Country Stars by William Meredith (p. 115)

This is a short poem, containing two stanzas with five lines in each stanza. The poem has the rhyme scheme of abbab and cdcdd. I like how the poem opens up with a cute scene of a child coming downstairs to get a goodnight kiss. From the title, I could picture a little house in the country, where there are beautiful sceneries and bright stars at night. However, the poem then talks about cities, a chemical plant, and clotted cars. The second stanza makes it clear that the poem is about pollution and how it’s destroying our environment. I think when the child in the first stanza “blows on a black windowpane until it’s white,” she is trying to create the brightness of the stars. Through the black windowpane, the child could see a great bear passing over the apple trees. I take this to mean the pollution smokes that resemble the shape of a big bear. Thus, the child covers that by blowing on the windowpane. The last line of the first stanza also says that “she puts her own construction on the night,” meaning that the child creates her own surroundings where there are no smokes but the brightness of stars, like the “bright watchers” in the last sentence of the poem.