Armitage's 'The Moon and the Zoo' marks ZSL's 200th
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- Simon Armitage, the current UK poet laureate, was commissioned to write 'The Moon and the Zoo' to mark the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)'s 200th anniversary, and narrates it in a specially commissioned animation illustrated by Greg King.
- The poem casts the moon as an 'incognito keeper and carer' making a night-time round of London Zoo — tending to gibbons, gorillas, tigers, sloths and a 'cupboard spider' — and ends with the line 'the moon hands over the keys of the world and trusts them to us,' which Armitage said is about 'our obligation to nature.'
- Armitage spent time behind the scenes at London Zoo, meeting 'Katie, a Mexican red-kneed spider,' watching Sumatran tigers, and visiting the reptile house, telling the charity he was drawn to 'the mysterious aspects of their existence which we never really get to see.'
- The piece places Armitage in a two-century literary lineage at London Zoo that includes AA Milne (who named 'Winnie' after the bear Winnipeg), Sylvia Plath (poem 'Zoo Keeper's Wife'), and Ted Hughes — who washed dishes at the zoo before becoming poet laureate and is said to have drawn on the experience for 'The Thought-Fox.'
- ZSL was founded in 1826, opened the world's first scientific zoo in London in 1828 for zoologists including Charles Darwin, and opened to the public in 1847, according to the article.
- Kathryn England, ZSL's CEO, said the poem captures 'both the wonder of those encounters and the responsibility that comes with them,' framing the 200th-anniversary milestone as a call to action for the charity's conservation mission.
- Armitage described the moon as a deliberate metaphor for ZSL's own 'keeping and caring' and 'important research' done 'away from public view' — the work the public doesn't see but on which the charity's mission depends.
Why it matters: For ZSL, having the sitting poet laureate write its 200th-anniversary poem places the conservation charity squarely in a two-century literary lineage that already includes AA Milne, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. For Armitage, the commission adds a high-profile institutional piece to his laureate tenure. And Armitage's closing line — 'the moon hands over the keys of the world and trusts them to us' — reframes the anniversary as a public call to stewardship rather than a backward-looking milestone.
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