On The Veerge Analysis

Compare the ways the writers present an old person in Great-grandfather and On the Verge
Great-grandfather is a poem which focuses on the narrator exploring age, specifically the poet’s great-grandfather as well as the experiences aging brings with it. Contrastingly, the poem On the Verge explores the first-hand experiences of the poet in aging and the difficulties which accompany old age.
Within Great-grandfather the first and last stanzas of the poem are both one line long and focus on the titular character ‘Great grandfather’. This demonstrates the poet is placing a direct emphasis upon the experiences of ‘great-grandfather’ in relation to aging. This is in direct contrast to the way in which an old person is presented in On the Verge. Within the poem On the Verge there is a much lesser focus on a romantic idea of age and a greater focus on the difficulties that accompany being an old person. For instance, in the last line of the final stanza Ware uses a metaphor which likens being an old person with “sitting on the verge”. The poet’s use of

For example, within the poem On the Verge the poet uses the phrase “three score years and ten” to demonstrate the passage of time. The poet has chosen to use an archaic measurement of time “score” to represent the idea of something aging, in this case a person. Pursuant to this, Downie’s poem Great-grandfather focuses on the “gramophone” as a symbol of age and being old. The use of the noun “gramophone” to symbolise age is deliberately chosen as many modern audiences would link the idea of a “gramophone” to age and as something old. Downie further develops the idea of age through the use of other nouns such as “Pharaoh” and “tomb” create a semantic field of antiquity which permeates the poem and reinforces the comparable idea of age represented through vocabulary that runs through both