I Ll Open The Window Analysis

‘When we Two Parted’ by Lord Byron and ‘I’ll Open the Window’ by Anna Swirszczynska, are both poems about unrequited love. Although both poems are about leaving someone and feeling alone, ‘When we Two Parted’ is about the lover of the speaker leaving them, while ‘I’ll Open the Window’ is about the speaker leaving their lover. ‘When we Two Parted’ shows how the speaker still has feelings for the woman that his left him and he feels sorrow as he cannot tell anyone as his love was possibly an affair. On the other hand ‘I’ll Open the Window’ talks about how the speaker does not feel the same about her lover as she once did in the past. In the poem the first line is “our embrace lasted too long. / we loved right down to the bone” this shows how

Similar techniques that the poets use includes; imagery, repetition and metaphors. Both poets use metaphor in the poem to compare something. For example in the third stanza of ‘When we Two Parted’ it says “they name thee before me / a knell to mine ear” which is comparing the sound of a ringing bell to his lovers name. In ‘I’ll Open the Window’ metaphor is used for the speaker to describe herself as an animal, as seen in the last stanza “I am an animal.” Both poets use types of sounds to show how they feel about their situations. Lord Byron uses alliteration in the second stanza “I hear thy name spoken / and share in its shame” where the “sh” sound in share and shame is emphasised. This helps to show that sharing his name is something he would rather not do, hence the “shhh” sound. Similarly, Swirszczynska uses onomatopoeia in stanza two of her poem “the clatter of your shoes” to show that she wants to hear the clatter of his shoes when he is leaving, as she cannot wait for him to leave. Lord Byron and Anna Swirszczynska both use the tone of feeling alone in their poems, but in ‘When we Two Parted’ the aloneness hurts the speaker, where in ‘I’ll Open the Window’ the speaker wants to be alone to start a fresh new