Ireland has produced some of the most distinct styles of poetry and writing. Its fantastic landscape has inspired a love of nature and has become a common theme in poetry. Imagery used in these literary works depict horizons of green, wondrous vegetation and often gloom skies. Another common theme in Irish poetry is hardship as the country has experienced more than its fair share throughout time. Two Irish poets have become immortalized through their works: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde and “The Great Hunger” by Patrick Kavanagh. Both poems are narratives that have dropped the traditional romanticism of ballads in order to depict great hardship. These poems are written in very different ways and yet are very successful in telling …show more content…
He was imprisoned due to indecent acts of homosexuality with his partner at the time. On 20 May 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol (Varty 31).
Oscar Wilde’s “The ballad of Reading Gaol” is written strictly in closed form. The poem is divided into six different part. There is a total of 109 stanzas with 654 lines altogether. There is a regular rhyme throughout the poem with every stanza being a sextet rhymed abcbdb. Within each stanza the lines alternate starting with an eight syllable line, followed by a six syllable line (Pascual 260). Wilde makes use of repetition with internal refrain. He does this because he wants to reinforce his ideas at set the gloomy atmosphere of the poem.
I never saw a man who
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This highly structured but gloomily writing pattern resembled that life in a prison. Justice is a hidden theme in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Some would argue that it was Wilde’s central reason for writing the poem in the first place. Wilde was sent to prison by the laws of men in the name of justice. Yet men who did not have a moral sense of justice where in charge of him serving his sentence. This tone of resentment is very apparent in the poem:
For man’s grim Justice goes its way
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the
Dylan Thomas wrote the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” It is about a son’s plea to his father who is approaching death. Two lines are repeated in the poem and addressed directly to the father. These lines structure the first stanza and collaborate as a couplet in the last. They are repeated a lot but each time, they have different meanings: statements, pleas, commands, or petitions. Repetition and rhyme scheme are parts of prosody in poetry. The rhyme scheme is built on two rhymes and forms of a pattern. The two rhymes are night and day and the pattern is aba, and in the last stanza, abaa. Even though the poem seems to have too much repetition, the fascinating imagery is more important and readers pay more attention to that instead.
This survey only touches on a handful of paintings, which cover a variety of typecasts, from the wretched to the cruel, and can be seen to be a pictorial catalogue of the difficulty of British views on Ireland. By representing the poor Irish as charming or the middle class as being similar to their British equals, the Irish could give the idea to be unthreatening and symbolically tamed. The artist, in their attempt to deal with the events of the great Famine accepted and indeed hid within the lines of conformity, refusing to tackle the reality of the situations, which more often than not were shabbily dealt with by those in power. As for the Irish artist, they revealed the greatest insight into the complications between the two nations. They thought themselves as different; there assumptions about art and subject matter left a lot to be desired.
...ration, onomatopoeia, rhyme etc. One of the sound types I will be looking at is Full or perfect rhyme. This sound type is significant as in Dulce Et Decorum Est at the end of each sentence rhymes with the one before the last. This is significant as when reading this poem you notice this rhyming scheme and take more time to stop and ponder over the significance of the language it is based around and what connotations that word has: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks” and “Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs”. This is one of the most effective rhyming schemes in the poem. Due to every second line rhyming this makes your remember what the poet was trying to put across in the previous lines as all the different lines have a way of tying in with one another.
In this essay I will compare and contrast a collection of different poems by Carol Anne Duffy, Robert Browning, Ben Johnson and Simon Armitage.
Oscar Wilde was born October 16, 1854. His death was taking place in Paris in the year 1900. In addition, he married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Wilde attender Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College for his education. Wilde happens to believe is aestheticism, which supported the arts beauty. After college, Wilde moved to London and continue his writing career. In the 1880s he wrote reviews, edited magazines, and published a volume of poetry as well as children stories. He had many great works, which includes “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, “A Woman of No Importance”, and “An Ideal Husband”.
Paddy’s Lament is about the terrible sufferings of the Irish people during the potato famine and of the cruel treatment that the Irish went through at the hands of the British people. The British did nothing to help the Irish survive when if they just shared their food they could have saved millions of people from a horrible death. They wrote in their newspapers that the Irish were lazy and didn’t want to work. At the time before the famine, the Irish loved their homeland and few wanted to immigrate to other countries. They had little money to buy a passage to America. They would send one member of the family to America and he would get a job to help those back home. As the famine got worse, the English were looking bad to the rest of the world and decided on a plan to ship all the Irish they could to America and Canada. This way they would rid themselves of the Irish problem. The British paid passage to families who would immigrate. The Irish were happy to leave, but the conditions on the British ships were deplorable. They had to stay on deck through the whole voyage, and about one in three people died. So many Irish people died that they became known as coffin ships. When they arrived in New York, the Irish were examined by a health examiner. Some families were separated from others, and children were separated from their mothers. The Irish were taken to tenements to live in. The conditions of the tenements were horrible. There were so many people living in them that the places we...
The entire poem including the first stanza, as scanned here, is octametre with mostly trochaic feet and some iams. The use of a longer line enables the poem to be more of a narration of the evening's events. Also, it enables Poe to use internal rhymes as shown in bold. The internal rhyme occurs in the first and third lines of each stanza. As one reads the poem you begin to expect the next rhyme pushing you along. The external rhyme of the "or" sound in Lenore and nevermore at then end of each stanza imitates the haunting nature of the narrator's thoughts. The internal rhyme along with the same external rhyme repeated at the end of each stanza and other literary devices such as alliteration and assonance and give the poem a driving chant-like sound. The musicality of the rhyme also helps one to memorize the poem. This helps keep the poem in your head after you've finished reading it, lingering in your thoughts just as the narrator's thoughts are haunting him. The rhyme also helps to produce a humming beat in the readers mind driving him on steadily..
In Heaney's book of poetry entitled Opened Ground, Heaney shows the readers many different ways in which English rule and influence effected and changed the lives of different people in Ireland. For example, in Two Lorries, Heaney describes a man who is a coal deliverer and his love for Heaney's mother. As the poem progresses, we can see a metamorphosis in the lorry. As the political situation in Ireland escalates and war between different religious factions grows more immanent, the lorry changes from a man who falls in love with Heaney's mother to a raving political and religious war type man who needs to become involved in the skirmish between the religious groups and by doing this eventually blows...
Choosing the first person form in the first and fourth stanza, the poet reflects his personal experiences with the city of London. He adheres to a strict form of four stanzas with each four lines and an ABAB rhyme. The tone of the poem changes from a contemplative lyric quality in the first to a dramatic sharp finale in the last stanza. The tone in the first stanza is set by regular accents, iambic meter and long vowel sounds in the words "wander", "chartered", "flow" and "woe", producing a grave and somber mood.
Throughout history, both men and women have struggled trying to achieve unattainable goals in the face of close-minded societies. Authors have often used this theme to develop stories of characters that face obstacles and are sometimes unable to overcome the stigma that is attached to them. This inability to rise above prejudice is many times illustrated with the metaphor of hunger. Not only do people suffer from physical hunger, but they also suffer from spiritual hunger: a need to be full of life. When this spiritual hunger is not satisfied, it can destroy a life, just as physical hunger can kill as well.
In relation to structure and style, the poem contains six stanzas of varying lengths. The first, second, and fourth stanzas
...ed to a bigger controversy. Instead he wrote about it and made everyone noticed the unfairness of the punitions in the prison life. The repetition in the poem is seen to show the harsh labor in the Reading Gaol. It is evident that Oscar Wilde hated the Victorian era and was against the cruelty of their morality.
The poem September 1913 focuses on the time where the Irish Independence was at its highest. Yeats repeats the phrase “romantic Ireland” a lot in this poem as it refers to the sacrifice of the materialistic things for independence and freedom. To further emphasize the importance and greatness of the revolution, Yeats pointed out the names of heroic individuals who gave their lives to fight for the cause. Yeats did not give any detail about the Irish heroes but he does state that “they have gone about the world like wind” (11). The heroes were so famous; their names could be heard and talked about all over the world. In this poem, Yeats does not go directly in to detail about the historical events that happened but fo...
When Bleak House was written, the Victorian Court system matched the Victorian atmosphere. The robing rooms lacked resources, so the “ . . . lawyers were forced to share the scant supply of towels, combs, and water . . . [while the] ‘English Courts of Law’ talks of general rudeness toward jury members, witnesses, and clients.” (Ratner 1) Not only was everyone involved in the courts treated poorly, but “ . . . the court rarely informed these groups of the proceedings . . .. “ (Ratner 2) This idea becomes the central conflict of Bleak House; a court case entangles many generations, and nobody remembers what caused the lawsuit because of their lack of information surrounding it. Due to the typicality of this situation during the Victorian era, it is clear why Dickens chooses to critique it.
In Damelus' Song to His Diaphenia, by Henry Constable, the typical characteristics of the Elizabethan lyric are abundant. The poem is written in iambic pentameter with a solid, almost musical rhythm throughout the poem. The musical quality is reinforced by the prominent AABCCB rhyme scheme in each of the three equal length stanzas. The language is adapted especially for the poem to accommodate the unyielding rhythm and rhyme scheme. All of these mentioned characteristics speak of a set of concrete rules and guidelines that the poet had followed when he was writing this lyric. The tone that is set is one of joy and delight in love and life another characteristic of Elizabethan lyrics. The anonymous speaker is experiencing a buoyant feeling and he communicates this through the lyric. The repetition of "how I do love thee!" in lines three, nine and fifteen summarises the message of this poem: The speaker is using basic images in nature in a simple manner to state how much he loves his "Diaphenia." It is dreadfully predictable and very easy to interpret and it is these characteristics that give the Elizabethan lyrics their instantaneous appeal.