Felix Randall

The young sisters, who know little about their father’s suffering, make fun of the hole without knowing the consequence of their action. The father is unable to intervene on his daughters’ behalf, as he sits there “face paled.” (40), till the mother orders the children to keep quiet. Apparently, his role in the family structure prevents him from expressing his emotion directly to his children. Nevertheless, after a visit to the doctor, it turns out that the father’s internal organs are intact despite their state of severe deformation, which shows the father’s incredible determination to remain functional in his family role after his tragic loss. Ironically, the doctors “pronounced him in great health” (41), which implies that apparent defects in mental health could be suppressed by the father’s unwillingness to challenge his image as a man, thus they are not easily detectable. The father’s behavioral patterns after his father’s death are in accordance to many stereotypical views of men.

The speaker is the voice of the poem, since “I” is used alot in this poem, it is in first person. I imagined the speaker’s

On my father’s cot there lay another sick person” (Wiesel 112). He goes through a loss of

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

Clare does a fair job in capturing how it is to be a lonely, melancholic soul, grieving the loss of friendship in love, all while making it clear that the speaker has a vast knowledge of self awareness. The simplistic seeming set up of the stanzas lends to a much deeper understanding of the human condition. “I Am” is written with precise punctuation, purposeful repetition, as well as a distinct rhyme scheme which helps to create the morose but understanding atmosphere that exists in the speaker 's head.

Prompt: Write a unified essay in which you relate the imagery of the last stanza to the speaker’s view of himself earlier in the poem and to his view of how others see poets.

Para-rhymes, in Owen’s poetry, generate a sense of incompleteness while creating a pessimistic, gloomy effect to give an impression of sombreness. Strong rhyming schemes are often interrupted unexpectedly with a para-rhyme to incorporate doubt to every aspect of this Great War. Who are the real villains and why are hundreds of thousands of lives being wasted in a war with no meaning? In ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the consistent sonnet rhyming scheme is disturbed by a half rhyme, “guns … orisons”, to show how the soldiers all died alone with only the weapons that killed them by their side, and a visual rhyme, “all … pall” to indicate that the reality of war is entirely the opposite to what it seems - no glory, no joy and no heroism, but only death and destruction. Owen occasionally works with this technique in a reverse approach to create similar thought. For instance, the assonance, consonance and half rhyme based poem, ‘The Last Laugh’, contains an unforeseen full rhyme, “moaned … groaned”, to emphasise that nothing is ever fixed in war except the ghastly fact that the weapons are the true winners. Different forms of Para rhymes often work together with common schemes to ably bring out the main ideas of Owen’s poetry.

This suggests a seriousness to his poetry which would be fitting to my interpretation of his poem.

The structure of this poem is rather notable. It mimics the structure of a Clare sonnet, fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, AABBCCDDEEFFGG rhyme scheme. Both Italian and Shakespearean sonnets tended to be love poems. However, the Clare sonnet doesn’t quite fit properly with either, it’s a touch more simplistic in nature, which lends this poem something akin to irony. This poem isn’t simply a love poem, it’s poem about the frustration of love along with being a cautionary tale. It has a more

“I Am” is a poem that was written by John Clare during the 1840s. Clare’s rustic poetry had brought him considerable fame and wealth, which enabled him to escape the meagre life he had experienced up until that time. After some years, his rural style of poetry was no longer in fashion, and his poetry met with little success. Psychological pressures resulting from the need to make money to feed his family, the struggles to adapt his poetry to the changing times and his inability to reconcile his rural neighbourhood with urban London which his fame had acquainted him with, took its toll on his sanity, and led to spells in two different asylums. The poem revolves around circumstances surrounding Clare at the time, and his entire life.

Imagine, he says, the urgency, the panic that causes a dying man to be ‘flung’ into a wagon, the ‘writing’ that denotes an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close at hand with the curious smile ‘like a devils sick of sin’. Sick in what sense? Satiated? Physically? Then that ‘jolt’. No gentle stretcher-bearing here but agony intensified. Owens imaginary is enough to sear the heart and mind.

In the first few lines of the poem, the reader can already receive a feel of the irony as the poet describes the scene of a maiden left behind as her lover falls in battle. The poet illustrates a scene as to where most readers would feel sorrow and sympathy towards the maiden and perhaps have the speaker in the poem enlighten the

The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. He was

“He’s lost his color far from here”. This line gives the reader a true image of how horrific military wounds could be. The irony that the soldier of the poem “liked a blood smear down his leg” then becomes rather depressing for the reader. This irony also suggests to the reader how foolish the subject is, due to his want of a “blood smear” and then, ironically he obtains “a leap of purple spurted from his thigh”. As well as graphical contrasts, there are also cases of contrasts between atmospheres before and after the war. It is shown that pre war, majority of the community was more joyful; “voices of play and pleasure.” Now however, it seems to be solemn as seen in “Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn.” This line symbolizes a disheartening atmosphere and also has connotations of a funeral which, once again, proves the horrors of war portrayed by Wilfred

Some of the recurrent themes and motifs in Hopkins’ poetry include the idea that the world resembles a book written by God, through which he expresses himself in order to provide humans with an opportunity to understand and approach him (Gardner 11). In ‘God’s Grandeur’ Hopkins can be seen to express his concern about the spiritual crisis of the Victorian period. During this time of urbanization and industrialization, Hopkins voiced his distress about human indifference to destruction. This poem is one of the very few which he wrote during the time when he served as a priest.