Both Manhunt and nettles use war imagery to show the emotions of the speaker. In Nettles the poet uses imagery to express how angry he feels towards the nettles. He refers to it as “green spears” and “regiment of spite” which suggests that the nettles are like a rival army/enemy. This shows the battles the father has to go through to protect his son and like being in the army he would have to fight his way through to help his son out. A “spear” is used to defend oneself which reflects the speakers need to defend his son from getting hurt. Also, a spear can cause injuries and damage would also reinforce the damage the nettles can cause. Perhaps regiment of spite suggests that the nettles are some sort of a warning, pointing out the start of many dangers that are yet to come. Nettles can conflict pain when a person touches the hairs on the plant. However the surface of the leaf can be touched which could indicate that any dangers can happen unexpectedly. Likewise “regiment of spite” could perhaps suggest that the nettles are guarding perils or dangers that may conflict pain at any time. Furthermore, nettles are perennial plants; they always grow and live for a long time. Therefore this indicates the ongoing potential threats the son would have to go through as well as suffer pain. However, in the Manhunt, the poet uses military imagery to show that the speaker feels determined to restore what she had lost from her lover during the war. The title “The Manhunt” links
The poem ‘Nettles’ by Vernon Scannell revolves around a father’s perspective on an accident involving his son, through which the poet explores a father-son relationship, wherein the father tries to protect his son from the various difficulties in life. However, despite his efforts to shield his son from these problems, they will be a constant threat in life. The boy here is a metaphor for the army, with the nettles being an extended metaphor of recurring war. The combined effect of these metaphors throws light on the difficulties in life. The poet has crafted a title which aptly uses symbolism to depict the nettles as evil. A cursory reading of the poem portrays the protective instinct of a father for his
Loving relationships are presented in the two poems. The wife in 'The Manhunt' helps her husband to come close to her again, whilst the father in 'Nettles' unhappily realises he can't protect his son from life, no matter how hard he tries. Both poems use the same semantic fields. War and pain are expressed in both poems. The words ‘regiment’, ‘recruits’, ‘bullet’, and ‘parachute silk’, all relate to war whilst the words ‘tender’, ‘blisters’, ‘blown...jaw’, ‘fractured...shoulder blade’ and ‘broken ribs’ all relate to pain. In both poems the relationships are both shown as being damaged by a war, whether it be emotional or physical, which has destroyed the two relationships. In Conclusion, both poems present vulnerability in relationships, not only is the person in pain vulnerable but the partner is also, due to an uncontrollable desire to help. This has been shown through their partners account of pain and through war
Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.
Jane Hirshfield connects to nature at her home in Marin County, California this is where she gets her inspiration for her poems. Hirshfield published “Tree” in 2000 as a free verse poem, divided into 4 stanzas and 4 sentences to convey the nature world. The poem represents a “young redwood” (line 2) growing near a house, near a kitchen window. The redwood is already scraping against the window frame of the house, reminding the reader of the “foolish” (line 1) idea of letting it grow there. Humans were created to be one with nature, but as they evolved as a species, they were obligated to choose between the materialistic world or the world of nature.
Lastly, the war changed the sniper by misplacing him. The sniper is described as a young person. “His face was the face of a student, thin and aesthetic, but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic.” The use of strong adjectives such as “thin and aesthetic” and “the cold gleam of a fanatic” show how the sniper is misplaced in this environment. Further into the text, youthful guilt became apparent. “The sniper looked at his enemy falling and he shuddered. The lust of battle died in him. He became bitten with remorse.” This use of metaphor shows the reader how quickly his emotions change, showing his guilt and regret for what he has done. Lastly, the snipers curiosity was influenced, as he felt he needed to find out the identity of his victim. He felt this because of how the misplacement had
Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.
Lovelace’s diction helps to develop the theme that war requires a passionate commitment from soldiers and can be as consuming as a relationship with a person the poet uses many dictions throughout the poem that suggests going to war such as ‘chaste, mistress, embrace, inconstancy, adore and love’. Likewise, Tennyson’s diction helps to develop the themes that war places soldiers under extreme stress, and soldiers can fight bravely and honorably even if the result of the battle is unsuccessful. In contrast, the word choices in Owen’s poem supports the theme that war is destructive, bitter, and violent, not the romantic efforts praised by those outside of it. Diction that has a strong impact on Borden’s poem is ‘satin, ermine, chic’, or words that have strong negative connotations such as ‘obscene, putrid, monstrous’. Equally important, The Diction in Borden’s poem support the theme that war is indifferent to human life. Words that display The Diction in “The Song of the Mud” are ‘cursed, sludge, haunting, trudge, blood-shod’. Whereas The tone of Lovelace’s poem is romantic and slightly playful along with Tennyson tone, which establishes a serious and respectful tone that also acknowledges the stress and confusion of war. Unlike the tone in the first set of poems, A great example of irony in Owen’s poem is “Ecstasy” (line 9), which usually associated with positive feelings of joy or intense
The soldiers who had attended the war were shown to have died brutally, like “cattle”, yet when reaching the home front, it is seen that they are laid to rest in a much more civil and dignified manner. The concept of this can be seen as an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem, with the battle front seen as a world filled with violence, fear and destruction, where as the home front is perceived as a place marked by order and ritual, a civilized world. The second sonnet opens with “What candles may be held to speed them all?”, invoking a more softer and compassionate tone towards the audience, more specifically through Owen’s use of a rhetorical question. It captures the readers’ attention, engaging them to feel empathetic and notice the shift of energy from anger and bitterness to a sadder and more somber tone. Owen’s use of descriptive language, as simple as it seems, such as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ provokes the audience to view the horrors of the war as if they had been placed onto children, because in reality the ‘men; who had signed themselves into war to fight in glory for their country had really only just been boys themselves.
During times of war, it is inevitable for loss to be experienced by all. In the poems “The Black Rat” and “The Photograph” written by Iris Clayton and Peter Kocan respectively, the idea of loss is explored through an omniscient narrator recalling a soldier’s involvement in warfare. While Clayton writes of a soldier’s abrupt loss of hope and how this experience negatively affects his life, Kocan explores how the loss of a loved one affects a family sixty years later. While both poems incorporate similar techniques in imagery and narration, the time setting for each poem is different as “The Black Rat” is set in Tobruk, Libya during World War 2 and “The Photograph” is set during World War 1.
In the second stanza the distinctive experience of power is present. The use of the technique of imagery and emotive words “to pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows’ tells us that the soldiers were strong, loyal and had enough power within a degree to assist fellow soldiers. The use of personification to create sound “sob and clubbing of the gunfire” This leads the audience to understand what the soldiers were up against without even directly saying it. The imagery visually shows the scene in their
Audit is a poem written by editor, translator, fiction writer, and poet Tony Barnstone. He has written a collection of varied and unique poems, from topics of the Second World War to a poetry book based on material in classic pulp fiction and B-movies. Barnstone has won numerous awards and literary competitions for his diverse work, including the Pushcart Prize in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. This poem offers an interesting take on relationships and love and its relation to the world of business. The poem utilizes a variety of poetic devices, some being obvious and others more obscure, which will be explored throughout this paper.
In the poem Charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Lord Tennyson utilizes repetition, personification, and diction to present how it is to be in battle and how it can impact people. In this poem Tennyson explains how the Battle of Balaclava
Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the
A. The basic elements of the piece interior of Tintern Abbey by J.M.W. Turner is
causes the poem to flow, and thus lightens up the dark and serious issue of war. The lines "But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place." are easy to read; however, their meaning is extremely