Men in Chains

Analyse (tell me how the poet creates this image - choice of words, literary devices, implication etc)The idea of a freezing, harsh climate is emphasized with "winter's city" and "winter's leaves". The poet uses words like "death" and "terrible" to highlight the freezing, barren winter.

Though written in a very light and simple manner, the poem comes across as something very profound, laden with meaning through its incongruities. The persona, wanting to see something, often goes to the well and looks down at the water to see it. This certain search below the water's surface can be compared to man's search beneath the human experience for meaning, for certainty.

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

The poet uses many metaphors, repetition and morbid diction to illicit the response I had to this poem. Firstly, Butson compared the emotions and internal struggles of a

Imagery techniques in this poem consist of key words, an example is “They’re rolling them out of the deep-freeze locker on the tarmac” this gives the readers an image of dead bodies being rolled out of an aeroplane onto the runway. By using a visual approach in the poem, the poet can better express his feelings on war to the reader(s).

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

This describes what the man on the bike is enduring and what he is seeing. By describing surrounding and what people look like, it allows the reader to create an image in their head of what is happening in the poem.

The author uses imagery in the poem to enable the reader to see what the speaker sees. For example, in lines 4-11 the speaker describes to us the

His return with a grocery sack of "many human ears," which he spills on the table, provides the central barbaric image of the poem. The victims are the final witness to the unspeakable crimes which are taking place. "Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground;" listening and witnessing to the truth which can't be hidden and can't be silenced. In spite of the colonel's reaction to those standing up to condemn the cruelties and injustices; "as for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can fuck themselves," the spirit of the victims lives on in those mutilated relics. Pressed to the ground they listen with hope for a future beyond the

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

This poems shows emotion from the crowed in the line " A struggling few got up to go in deep despair ." the rest dung to the hope which spring eternal in the human breast ;" But Flynn preceded Casey , as did also jimmy Blake , and the farmer was a hoodoo , while the latter was cake. " Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hand with dirt: five thousand tongues storm warm on a stern and distant shoes."kill

. . should burn and rave at the close of day”(2). This means that old men should fight when they are dying and their age should not prevent them from resisting death. Another example of personification in the poem is “Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay”(8). This line personifies the men’s frail deeds by saying that they could have danced. This means that the potential actions of the men could have flourished and contributed greatly to their lives. The metaphor “. . . words had forked no lightning. . .”(5) is about how the men had done nothing significant with their lives. They had not achieved anything great or caused a major change. The simile “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay” is about how even grave and serious men will fight against death for as long as they can. Another notable example of figurative language within the poem is “. . . blinding sight”(13). This oxymoron details how the men can see very well and it is very obvious to them that they will die soon, but they know that they can control how they will leave this world. There is an abundance of imagery within this poem, a few examples of which are “. . . danced in a green bay”(8), and “. . . caught and sang the sun in flight”(10) . These examples of imagery are both appealing to the sense of sight by using descriptive words such as “Green” and “danced” in the first example and words such as “caught” and “flight” among others. The second example also appeals to the sense of sound by

In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.

The short stanzas containing powerful imagery overwhelm the readers forcing them to imagine the oppression that the speaker went through in

Several poems in the anthology explore the intensity of human emotion. Explore this theme, referring to these three poems in detail and by referencing at least three other poems from your wider reading.’