Seamus Heaney & Tony Curtis Essay

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

The story is written in first person. The story is written from the narrator’s point of view. First person pronouns are: I, me, mine, myself, we, us, ours, and ourselves. This story is being told by Sal, the main character or protagonist.

Another mood in this story is sad, because at the end of the story Annabel Lee died. It made the mood of the story much sadder. In stanza six it talks about how he lies by her

6. The person speaking in the poem is the man, or the author, as this poem is told in first person.

Many times poetry is reflective of the author’s past as well as their personal struggles. One struggle that poets write about is of identity and the creation, as well as loss, of individual identities. Using a passage from the essay Lava Cameo by Eavan Boland, I will show how two poets use their craft to describe their struggle with identity. Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney both write poems which express an internal struggle with roles of identity and how they recreate their roles to fit their needs. Through retrospection and reflection, both poets come to realize that the roles they led as well as those they reinvented have created their own personal identities. Boland, in her

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” I find the meaning of this quote to be saying that poetry allows individuals to be more part of their community by providing them a service in some way as if they are a tribe. An Irish poet named Seamus Heaney created this quote. Moreover, the quote has a good connection to Heaney when he made poems in Ireland but I found an interesting and particular theme within his poems. It feels as if Heaney explores how humans engage in killing and other brutalities, but justifies their inhumane actions by punishing others who can be perceived as traitors to their "justifiable" causes. In short, I find

1.Identify the voice of this poem~from whose perspective is the poem spoken? Using several pieces of support from the poem, explain the voice.

Firstly, the four-stanza poem begins, in first-person narration, with an exposition of the speaker’s first kiss at the age of five as an act of force and objectification by a young boy. The speaker illustrates their experience as they were held down by their arms in the lines 3-5:

These two seemingly opposite tones and moods existing in one poem simultaneously resemble the ambiguity in the speaker that he reveals when he describes his condition very ambiguously. For instance, in the first line, he portrays himself as a “dead man”(1), but in the line immediately after, the dead man is moaning, which is biologically impossible. The unclear subject raises the issue of who the speaker is, if he should not be able to comment on himself because he is already dead. When the speaker uses the same pronouns, “he” and “him” from both the first person and the third person perspectives to refer to himself, this becomes even more puzzling; the readers are no longer sure of who the speaker is and who the subject of the poem is. One possible cause of these uncertainties is the discrepancy between the speaker’s real self and his public self; one that resembles who he

The poem is in first person point of view. The narrator is the speaker. There is no setting. The occasion of this poem is in the 50’s while Plath is pregnant. This child she will have will be her first child with Ted Hughes her husband.

Methods: The poet in the very first line uses he two words “Your” and “my” to create clear separation or division.

     Blake expresses his poem in first person, as a young chimney sweeper. This gives his poetic voice creditability because the subject of the poem is chimney sweepers. In addition, using first person creates a deeper sense of sympathy in the reader.

Seamus Heaney is a widely celebrated poet from Northern Ireland and was well known for writing about his culture and song-like pieces that touched on historical and ethical natures. In “Punishment”, the piece focuses on the image of a dead girl, now a preserved piece of history, who was supposedly killed for committing adultery in Germany. In the dark, dramatic, and historical poem “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney, he uses overt words and phrasing, internal rhyme, as well as alliteration, metaphors, and other literary devices to uncover the brutality, injustice, and chilling exposedness of the murder of the young girl, who is the subject of the piece.

The use of both identified and unidentified narrative voices has been an essential feature in most of the poetry I have studied, as it determines the manner in which the content of the poem is presented. Poets will often use an identified persona to express views which they themselves might disagree with in a negative light, such as in My Last Duchess by Robert Browning. Unidentified personas are often used by poets as well; perhaps to give a more universal application to their poems. Conversely identified personas may understandably be used for the opposite effect of giving the poem a personal and intimate

Punishment, written by Seamus Heaney, is a poetry that has a corpse of a girl being as the main subject. In this poem, Seamus Heaney indirectly links the brutality behind the corpse of a girl to the modern form of brutality that existed when Irish rebels killed Irish females who were married to Britain soldiers. This analysis of Punishment is divided into three main parts. First is to answer the question ‘To what extent is the poem lyrical?’ Next is an analysis of Seamus Heaney’s usage of patterns of sounds and phonologies. Last is an analysis of emotionally significant experiences.