Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake
Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake - meaning Summary
Love Shaped by Tectonics
The poem argues that Earth's restless geology—continual shifting, faults and volcanic activity—makes life and human love possible, contrasting Earth with static, unloving Venus. Murray links planetary heat and plate movement to fertile, changing landscapes while acknowledging the violent consequences of that movement: sudden quakes and destruction that cost lives. The poem frames geological instability as both enabling evolution and human intimacy and as the source of recurring human tragedy.
Read Complete AnalysesIn fact the Earth never stops moving. Northbound in our millimetric shoving we heap rainy Papua ahead of us with tremor and fumarole and shear but: no life without this under-ruckus. The armoured shell of Venus doesn't move. She is trapped in her static of hell. The heat of her inner weight feeds enormous volcanoes in that gold atmosphere which her steam oceans boil above. Venus has never known love: that was a European error. Heat that would prevent us gets expressed as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted. These make Earth the planet for lovers. If coral edging under icy covers or, too evolutionary slow for human histories to observe it, a low coastline faulting up to be a tree-line blur landscape in rare jolts of travel that squash collapsing masonry with blood then frantic thousands pay for all of us.
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