The City Planners and the Planners Comparison

In the poems ‘The City Planners’ and ‘The Planners,’ how do the poets create an effect of disillusionment and discomfort? In the poems ‘The City Planners’ and ‘The Planners,’ the poets create an effect of disillusionment and discomfort through the purpose and scenario and through their use of imagery and diction. The Poets create disillusionment and discomfort through the purpose and scenario. In ‘The Planners,’ the poem talks about how ‘They,’ the planners, have total control over the city and that nothing stands in their way in the first stanza.

The poem then goes on to compare what the planners do, to dentistry by saying that the planners erase the flaws and that all gaps are plugged in the second stanza. In the final stanza the poem talks about how the speaker can’t write poetry anymore and that the people today should still remember the past and plan for the future. The purpose of the poem is the speaker thinks the planner are trying to make everything perfect but it isn’t necessary and that the planners are also too controlling.

In the poem ‘The City Planners,’ how the suburbs are so perfect in the first stanza and then say that the suburbs aren’t really as perfect as they seem and they are just hiding behind a mask of perfection in the second stanza. In the final four stanzas the speakers talks about how people are hiding who they really are from the world. The purpose of this poem is that the city planners try and create their idea of perfection which doesn’t really exist. This is similar to ‘The Planners’ because both poems are saying that the planners are trying to create perfection and then fail without realising it.

This is one way the poet creates disillusionment and discomfort. The poets also create disillusionment and discomfort through the use of imagery. In the second stanza of ‘The City Planners,’ the line ‘even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows,’ shows that the houses stare at things or people and can create discomfort for people because it is like a person staring at someone without realising it and the person being stared at can feel discomforted.

In the third stanza the lines ‘the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster,’ makes the reader realise that the perfection they live in could just be an illusion and this helps them get rid of the illusion. The line ‘concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard,’ shows that the city planners don’t even look at each other’s work to learn from their mistakes which can create discomfort for the reader because mistakes that have happened before could happen where the live.

In the poem ‘The Planner,’ the lines ‘Even the sea draws back and the skies surrender,’ creates discomfort even nature is scared to get in the way of the planners and shows the reader that the planners are destroying nature and that if the planners continue to do what they do then soon there will be hardly any nature or no nature left. The line ‘useless blacks with dental dexterity,’ is comparing cities to going to the dentist.

It is saying that people go to the dentist to make their teeth perfect but it isn’t needed to survive and that it is the same thing with making the cities look perfect; the planners do it but it’s not needed, this creates discomfort because going to the dentist is not normally a place people like to go. The poems create discomfort in different ways because ‘The City Planners’ creates it through the reader thinking they are living in an illusion but the ‘The Planners’ create discomfort through dentist metaphors.

The poets create disillusionment and discomfort through the use of diction. In the poem ‘The Planners,’ the poet uses the words ‘gridded,’ ‘permutations of possibilities,’ ‘alignment,’ ‘desired points,’ ‘linked,’ and ‘mathematics’ to create discomfort. These words are all to do with maths and makes people feel discomforted because the reader can feel like they are back at school.

The words ‘erase the flaws,’ ‘blemishes,’ ‘blocks,’ dental dexterity,’ ‘gaps are plugged,’ ‘country wears perfect rows,’ ‘shining teeth,’ ‘anaesthesia,’ ‘piling,’ and ‘drilling’ are all to do with dentistry and can create discomfort because people often don’t like going to the dentist. In the poem ‘The City Planners’ the poet uses the words ‘offends us’ and ‘dent in our car,’ which shows that it is from the speakers point of view and shows that they are discomforted because they don’t fit in.

The words ‘hysteria,’ ‘avoidance,’ ‘spilled oil a faint,’ ‘brick surprising as a bruise,’ ‘vicious’ and ‘too fixed stare of the side windows’ create discomfort because they are words to do with imperfection and these words make the reader realise that the suburbs aren’t as perfect as they seem. Both poems make the reader feel discomforted by using words that scare them or make feel uncomfortable. The three ways the poets of ‘The City Planners’ and ‘The Planners’ create disillusionment and discomfort is through scenario and purpose, imagery and diction.