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Comparison of Poetry: Robert Hayden’s and Helen Farries Poems

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One of the features that differentiates poetry from other groups of literature is the way it utilizes the melodic potential of language. Not only do poets play with the variations of words, they play with the sounds of words, and by taking advantages of the fact that hearing something expressed can be as pleasant as thinking about it. The poet - in this sense, is sometimes considered to be a musician, making a rhyming, rhythmic kind of music with words, and sometimes playing off their sounds to complement what they mean. In other words, when it seems the sounds and senses of a poem reinforces its meaning in some way, the effects are usually striking. As a result, this essay is going emphasize on several poems that I find intriguing discussing the senses and sounds to formulate my own interpretations.

A brutal direct poem that’s very powerful is Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” (Hayden, 551). In this poem, the writer employs concrete specifics and sensory descriptions to create a literal image for readers to resourcefully create. For example, at the beginning of “Those Winter Sunders” the speaker reflects back on the coldness of his childhood. He remembers the “cold” in both straightforward and figurative terms. At first, he focuses on the Sundays on how his father would wake up early to get the fire going before walking the rest of the house. However, the poem is really about how the speaker laments the fact that growing up he never really understood the meaning of his father’s actions – how they were the way he communicated his love for the family, for the speaker.

In addition to this, the concrete specific words in the poem also show how the speaker comes to finally appreciate on how the father gave himself to ke...

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...has little to no choice in the matter as your path in life is already created. In this case, I am a yuppie because I grew up a yuppie in the suburb demographics of South Orange County, California.

Works Cited

Hayden, Robert. “Those Winter Sundays.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Mayer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 551. Print

Farries, Helen. “Magic of Love.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Mayer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 581. Print

Slavitt, David. “Titanic.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Mayer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 620. Print

Simpson, Louis. “In The Suburbs.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Mayer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 626. Print
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