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Compare and contrast the views of Autumn in Ted Hughes’s There Came A

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Compare and contrast the views of Autumn in Ted Hughes’s There Came A Day and John Keats’s Ode To Autumn. How do the poets use language to convey these views? There are many similarities and differences between the two autumn poems ‘There came a day’ by Ted Hughes and ‘Ode to autumn’ by John Keats. Both poems are based on autumn but they portray it in different ways. ‘There came a day’ presents autumn in a negative way where as ‘ode to autumn’ presents it in a positive way. The reason that John Keats may have written in a in a positive way about autumn is because he was a pre-twentieth century poet and had a love for nature and respect for the countryside. The style in which he writes is known as ‘romanticism’, which is when …show more content…

In ‘There Came A day’, Hughes has a different approach to describing autumn. In the first line, the title is repeated, but it gives us more information as to what the poet is talking about. We know this from the quotation ‘‘There Came a Day that caught the summer.’’ Hughes then describes how summer ends and autumn begins by using powerful language such as ‘’caught’, ‘wrung’ and ‘plucked’. The words relate to murder of the summer and they create strong images in the reader’s head. ‘There Came a Day’ speaks to the reader through a character in the form of autumn and the author narrates in the first and last stanza. This is a good and appealing way to keep the reader’s interest in the poem. Personification is used when autumn is narrating, vocabulary such as ‘ate it’ and ‘plucked it’ is used in the first stanza when Hughes describes how autumn ended summer. The phrase ‘’plucked it’’ refers to autumn taking the leaves off summer’s leaves compared to a person ‘plucking’ feathers. In the last stanza Hughes reveals that autumn is the day that came he also uses more personification. ‘’His mouth was wide and red as a sunset’’ and ‘’his tail was an icicle’’. These metaphors represent the head and tail of autumn, so they are describing the transitions of autumn. The beginning of autumn is hot and everything is colourful like summer, but near the end of autumn it is cold and pale like winter. Metaphors are also used throughout the poem ‘There came a

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