ABSTRACT
Jonathan Bate concludes The Song of the Earth with a Wallace Stevens poem called The Planet on the Table’ and a request to the reader:
As you read the poem, hold in your mind's eye a photograph of the earth taken from space: green and blue, smudged with the motion of cloud … so small in the surrounding darkness that you could imagine cupping it with your hands. A planet that is fragile, a planet of which we are a part but which we do not possess.
(2000: 282)