We have studied six poems that share the theme of the loss and suffering which can bitterly affect the personal relationships between the personas. Poem at Thirty Nine by Alice Walker, written at the age of thirty nine, focuses on the relationship between her father and herself. The first line: “how I miss my father”, clearly shows that she misses her father, but he is dead. Comparatively Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney deals with the death of his four years old brother: “a four foot box, a foot for every year”. He is looking at the death of his brother in a sudden car accident, from the perspective of a child himself. Remember by Christina Rossetti has a conflicting theme of love and death: “remember me when I am gone away” and she continues to battle with it throughout the entire poem. …show more content…
On the other hand, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas is a son’s plea to his dying father. His aim is to show his father that all men experience the same end; nevertheless they fight for life: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” is just like the main idea for this poem. Thomas categorizes men into four different types with strong imagery to persuade his father that no matter what has happened in life, there is always a reason to live. This can be compared with W H Auden’s poem Funeral Blues, wherein Auden uses powerful imagery to convey the raw grief that the speaker is experiencing: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”; he wants complete silence, to mark his loved one’s
Life is something that requires a significant amount of physical and mental effort. Some are deeply fortunate to have everything arranged for them and not have a single worry. For others, life is full of stress and hardships. It all just depends on how one was raised and brought into this world. Out of the Rick Bragg articles, the characters went through grief and heartache, government involvement, and the absence of life’s given moments.
Many poems, like the essayist’s Richard Harrison’s work, deeply explore universal ideas about death, love, grief, and the mystery of life. Many readers, like myself, can find connections with Harrison’s poems on such topics of life and loss and deeper meaning hidden in the poem. Not only could I make connections with some of Harrison’s poems, but I also made new understandings and realizations
Both of which contain themes of loss and death. In On a Portrait of a Deaf Man the poet talks vividly about death, more specifically the death of his father. In tribute to his late father, this poem talks about the harsh reality of death and losing a loved one in graphic, detailed
James McAuley and Gwen Harwood’s poems employ metaphor, symbolism and imagery to express the isolation felt by those who suffer loss. In “Pietà” a father is experiencing the physical loss of a loved one, whilst in “In the Park” a mother is suffering from the loss of self-identity as a result of motherhood. Both poets employ poetic techniques to convey the unique experience of loss catered to each individual. McAuley’s intent is to highlight that although mothers grieve, so too do fathers, whereas, Harwood’s intent is to address the role of motherhood in a realistic
Over the course of human history, a countless amount of poems have been written by a numerous amount of poets. With such a myriad of poetry, similarities between these literary works is inevitable; in the same vein, this guarantees a huge degree of diversity as well. Even with two poems that appear to be the same, one would likely find contrasting elements within them, and vice-versa. This can be related to life itself: many people go through the same types of condition but face different outcomes, or conversely, different circumstances with similar results. Two poems about like situations in life and their differing aftermaths are “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins and “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee.
“Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” is a poem written by Dylan Thomas at the time when his father was at the brink of death. The piece is actually a villanelle where it consist of six stanzas, each with three lines except for the sixth stanza which has four lines. The rhymes on the first until fifth stanzas are aba, aba, aba, aba, aba. While, abaa is the rhyme for the last quatrain stanza. Thomas died a few months after his father, it is believed that this poem was written by him especially for his father.
The narrator’s changing understanding of the inevitability of death across the two sections of the poem illustrates the dynamic and contrasting nature of the human
War can have a profound effect on soldiers who have witnessed the atrocities that occur on the battlefield. Death becomes a part of their everyday life, however; it is the reaction to this and the coping mechanisms that soldiers use that defines true self from that of the field. This essay will examine Tim O’Brien’s short stories “The Things They Carried” and “How to Tell a True War Story” in order to show how the soldiers dealt with death through their responses and attitudes. For the most part the reader is able to identify some common themes in responding to death between the two short stories.
The poem “A Better Resurrection” is written by Christina Rossetti. All three poems are written with many literary and poetic devices that allow the reader to better understand and comprehend the poem. Similes are one of the many literary techniques that were used in all three poems. Similes compare two things with “like” or “as”. This literary device allows the poet to elaborate and the reader to comprehend.
In the poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poet uses a metaphor to compare death as “night” and “dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas repeats the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” in each stanza to emphasize that all men should not accept death, but fight it until their last breath. He describes four types of dying men before addressing his father. First, he states that intelligent men that know death is near and have not had any impact on society still fight to live: “though wise men at their end know dark is right, / Because their words had forked no lightning they / do not go gentle into the good night.” (Lines 4-6).
The techniques, such as, imagery and tone, help create the theme of memory and loneliness throughout the poem. The poem is very simple and complex as the same time where the speaker is using simple everyday objects to represent life and death. Using those literary techniques, Lee creates a tone and image of grief over the father’s death where the speaker lives through his memories leaving him forever
The attitudes to grief over the loss of a loved one are presented in two thoroughly different ways in the two poems of ‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘Remember’. Some differences include the tone towards death as ‘Funeral Blues’ was written with a more mocking, sarcastic tone towards death and grieving the loss of a loved one, (even though it was later interpreted as a genuine expression of grief after the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” in 1994), whereas ‘Remember’ has a more sincere and heartfelt tone towards death. In addition, ‘Funeral Blues’ is entirely negative towards death not only forbidding themselves from moving on but also forbidding the world from moving on after the tragic passing of the loved one, whilst ‘Remember’ gives the griever
Conflict is a big theme and many poems and texts have been written on this topic, but two of the most well done and most expressive poems about this topics are “Out of the Blue” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Even though the topic is the same the two authors, Simon Armitage and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, present the theme with different approaches, one about the innocent, one about the ones that chose to get involved In the conflict. The first poem, “Out of the blue”, is about the terrorist acts on 9/11 and the position that the ordinary people were putting in. The people that have been caught in the two towers were ordinary people going to their jobs and doing their daily routines and they were definitely not expecting what happened.
In the poems “A Psalms of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” by Emily Dickinson, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” by Walt Whitman the themes, mood, structure and literary devices has similarities and differences. In Longfellow’s poem “A Psalms of Life” its theme focuses on how everyone should live a life for today.
This creates a dissimilarity between some of the poems and how death is presented. Long Distance is about the pain of remembering someone who has died naturally. The poem describes the narrator’s father’s failure to come to terms with the death of his wife. Although she has been dead for two years he still renews her bus pass and warms her slippers. His son cannot understand this behaviour, but the final stanza reveals that now that both his parents are dead, and despite how he felt earlier, he still keeps their phone numbers in his “new black leather phone book.”