Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Gwen Harwood explore similar ideas in their poetry, creating an emotional reaction in readers through the use of stylistic features. The poets’ use of contrast, imagery, allusion, and caesura in the exploration of familial relationships, death, and loss of innocence to manipulate and emphasise the reader’s emotional response. Familial roles are explored by Harwood and Heaney to evoke emotional reactions from the reader. Section one of Harwood’s ‘Father and Child’ explores the narrative of a “wisp-haired” child experiencing a loss of innocence after maiming a barn owl in rebellion against her “old No-sayer” father while he was “robbed of power by sleep”. Section two draws upon and contrasts this description …show more content…
Notably, in Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, death is explored through a school boy receiving news of his brother’s death. Frequent caesura in the poem is used to disrupt the pace set by the iambic pentameter, giving the reader an insight into the confusion and grief felt by the persona as the writing begins to lose its flow. When the persona meets his “father crying –” despite that the father had “always taken funerals in his stride”, the caesura after the mention of crying signifies the distress of the family. Heaney does this to build up the drama, making it more devastating when the brother’s death is revealed. Contrastingly, Frost’s poem ‘Out, out-’, uses personification to emphasise the distress of death. The saw that kills the boy, “snarled and rattled… seemed to leap”, which gives the instrument human qualities, evoking a heightened sense of distress in the reader at death. ‘Mid-term Break’ uses the technique of allusion in regards to the “poppy bruise on his temple”. This line simultaneously emphasises the superficiality of the injury that killed the brother, and alludes to the dead soldiers of the First World War, while the “snowdrops and candles (soothing) the bedside” symbolise death and funerary rituals. These allusions have the effect of evoking mental images from the reader and guiding them to draw parallels between poem and other events, both historical and personal. This technique is …show more content…
Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’ makes use of simile to provide contrast between the innocent act and the loss of innocence coupled an aftermath of inevitable disappointment. The berries, “sweet like thickened wine”, take a negative connotation when they are subsequently described to “burn like a plate of eyes”. There is contrast between the idyllic day picking blackberries and the aftermath, in which the “lovely canfuls smelt of rot”. The rhyming couplet to end the poem, in which the persona “hoped they’d keep, knew they would not” is used to place emphasis on the line and the idea proposed in it; that innocence is inevitably and disappointingly lost, just as seasons change and fruit rots. Innocence is also explored by Harwood in ‘The Secret Life of Frogs’, in which parenthesis as the persona “(… thought a brothel was a French hotel)” is used to enclose the childhood thoughts, emphasising to the reader this childish innocence. The parenthesis also changes the tone of the poem by interspersing serious discussion of war with the misinterpretation of the adult concept of brothels. Innocence is also conveyed by Harwood through the imagery of the frogs, symbolically killed by both schoolboys and “jerries”, but held by the children “in hands that would not do them wrong”. The contrasting imagery between the brutal way frogs are “[blown]
Harwood’s poem Barn Owl, expertly conveys the poem with emotion and tells the story of a young girl losing her childish innocence by rebelling against her father and killing a barn owl. Using a variety of literary techniques, the poem has the ability to provide the audience a visual image of the scene. Expressed in great detail, the themes of innocence, death and rebelling against authority within the poem offer the audience another intriguing poem written by Gwen
Presentation of Family Relationships in Carol Anne Duffy's Poem Before You Were Mine and in One Poem by Simon Armitage
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons. This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.
Initially, Harwood depicts the father as oppressive and “old no-sayer” which reflects the societal expectations at the time as fathers were supposed to be an authoritarian figure who were overprotective. This causes a strain on the relationship he has with his daughter as witnessed in the undertone of bitterness in “let him dream of a child obedient, angel-mild” which demonstrates the child’s resentment towards her father. Also, the juxtaposition between an “obedient child” which the father believes the child to be and the “horny fiend” the child sees herself as highlights the vastly different views of the child and her father. Harwood employs symbolism through the gun which represents power and authority. In an attempt to rebel, the child takes the gun and shoots an owl believing herself to be “master of life and death.” However, unlike Hughie this child is uneducated and unaware of the consequences of her actions . Harwood’s use of language referring to the owl as a “bundle of stuff” and as a “wrecked thing” underscores the child’s immature mentality. The “fallen gun” is a symbolic motif which illustrates how when faced with the reality of her decisions, the child regrets it. Her naivety highlights how she still needs her father. The use of verbs “I leaned my head upon my father’s, and wept” connotes vulnerability but also underscores a new closeness and understanding between the two. One Day and “Father and Child” both depict how societal influences can contribute to an individual’s view which can differ to others causing a strain on their relationship, however, the result due to this differ in each text. In One Day this causes Hughie and Alf to become more estranged whilst in “Father and Child” they are able to overcome this and come to a new understanding
I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one.
Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her
In Millay’s poem, the idea of grief and sad can be discovered through the tone of the narrator and further strengthened by
Through the use of fervent symbolism, allusive diction, and lurid allegory Seamus Heaney, in his poem “Blackberry Picking”, creates a framework to suggest a deeper meaning of lust. Although, Heaneys’ speaker has a progressively declining view on the lust he is referencing, he never loses his passion for the subject.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
The second and third stanzas of Funeral Rites are highly descriptive, as Heaney describes ‘their puffed knuckles’. This close, sensory description of the body is present in many of his bog poems, but specifically in The Grauballe Man, as, similar to Funeral Rites, Heaney dedicates multiple stanzas to the direct, det...
Once the reader can passes up the surface meaning of the poem Blackberry-Picking, by Seamus Heaney, past the emotional switch from sheer joy to utter disappointment, past the childhood memories, the underlying meaning can be quite disturbing. Hidden deep within the happy-go-lucky rifts of childhood is a disturbing tale of greed and murder. Seamus Heaney, through clever diction, ghastly imagery, misguided metaphors and abruptly changing forms, ingeniously tells the tale that is understood and rarely spoken aloud.
During the early seventeenth century, poets were able to mourn the loss of a child publicly by writing elegies, or poems to lament the deceased. Katherine Philips and Ben Jonson were two poets who wrote the popular poems “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”, “On My First Son”, and “On My First Daughter” respectively. Although Philips and Jonson’s elegies contain obvious similarities, the differences between “On the Death of My Dearest Child” and “On My First Son” specifically are pronounced. The emotions displayed in the elegies are very distinct when considering the sex of the poet. The grief shown by a mother and father is a major theme when comparing the approach of mourning in the two elegies.
Both, the poem “Reluctance” by Robert Frost and “Time Does Not Bring Relief” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, revolved around the theme of lost love. Each poet used a similar array of poetic devices to express this theme. Visual imagery was one of the illustrative poetic devices used in the compositions. Another poetic device incorporated by both poets in order to convey the mood of the poems was personification. And by the same token, metaphors were also used to help express the gist of both poems. Ergo, similar poetic devices were used in both poems to communicate the theme of grieving the loss of a loved one.
Many writers use powerful words to portray powerful messages. Whether a writer’s choice of diction is cheerful, bitter, or in Robert Hayden’s case in his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” dismal and painful, it is the diction that formulates the tone of the piece. It is the diction which Hayden so properly places that allows us to read the poem and picture the cold tension of his foster home, and envision the barren home where his poem’s inspiration comes from. Hayden’s tumultuous childhood, along with the unorthodox relationships with his biological parents and foster parents help him to create the strong diction that permeates the dismal tone of “Those Winter Sundays.” Hayden’s ability to both overcome his tribulations and generate enough courage
In the poem “A song of Despair” Pablo Neruda chronicles the reminiscence of a love between two characters, with the perspective of the speaker being shown in which the changes in their relationship from once fruitful to a now broken and finished past was shown. From this Neruda attempts to showcase the significance of contrasting imagery to demonstrate the Speaker’s various emotions felt throughout experience. This contrasting imagery specifically develops the reader’s understanding of abandonment, sadness, change, and memory. The significant features Neruda uses to accomplish this include: similes, nautical imagery, floral imagery, and apostrophe.