Compare Plath and Larkin

3241 WordsApr 5, 201213 Pages
Compare and contrast the ways in which death is portrayed in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’ and ‘Ambulances’ and Sylvia plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Death and Co’ The poems i am going to analyse are: • Lady Lazarus • Death and Co • Ambulances • Days It is understatement to say that both Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin have immense depth and subsidiary meanings to their poems, both writers expertly structure their poems and used varied techniques to convey their themes of death and instil their messages to their readers. Plath goes about it an autobiographical manner and parades death as a theatrical show leaving the audience in shock and awe however Larkin presents death in a rather trivial manner in comparison to Plath. He juxtaposes the…show more content…
At times the tone is hysterically strident and demanding: “unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. Iambic pentameter is also used in Lady Lazarus because it mimics the rhythm of conversational speech and makes it closer to spontaneous speech. This also highlights Lady Lazarus aural quality as it is meant to be read aloud which emphasizes it rhetorical intensity and perhaps the power that Lady Lazarus has gained throughout the poem “ I am your opus I am your valuable The pure gold baby” The spontaneous structure of the poem emphasises the emotional and physcological disintegration of Lady Lazarus and how she speaks spontaneously out of pain that she is feeling form her suicidal attempts On the contrary, Larkin also used five groups of six lines of poetry (sestet) of iambic trimeter and roughly--there are some irregularities, a, with the first and last lines of each sestet rhyming, and the middle rhyming “a–b-a-b” like a ballad. The second stanza, only the first and last lines have been ended with punctuation leaving everything in the middle flowing. The "women in the shops" are detached from the "Wild white face"
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