Amaud Johnson Aesthetics Essay

The poem “Aesthetics” by Amaud Johnson instantly struck me. It was easily understandable but, portrayed a much deeper message. The poem speaks about a group of boys torturing butterflies, feeding alka-seltzer which is a kind of pain reliever, to pigeons for entertainment. This sickens me because of how they find joy in causing mischief to harmless creatures. Furthermore, Amaud Johnson’s deeper message within the poem is how we, human beings, harm the environment and are poor steward’s of God’s creations. The characters can be visualized as a group of kids aging between eight to thirteen years old that seek entertainment when they “plucked off the [butterflies] legs, and watched them tumble from leaves like pinecones” (Stanza 3-4) and when the “[pigeons] flung from a window. White foam from their mouths stark against the asphalt” (Stanza 6-7). These kids symbolize human civilization and, the image the poem attempts to portray is how we, humans, are causing the destruction of nature for our own personal benefits. This is a clear and solid representation of us as a being. Instead of integrating our society into nature, we forcefully constructed our needs into the environment. Simply being in the city, we are blinded and overjoyed, just like the group of boys, by how easy and convenient life is for us. However, we are
This quote did not make any sense at first. In fact, I thought it was not supposed to even be part the poem. However, this quote is very much connected to the last stanza of the poem. Specifically, the line “raw with the rightness of God (Stanza 9). Through the first and last stanza of the poem, we can discover the main problem humans face, our distraction from God through material things. We must understand that our civilization’s greatest weakness is nature. We need nature, but nature does not need