Theme Of Telephone Conversation By Wole Soyinka

James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy are both contemporary poets. Their poems ‘In Paris with You’ and ‘Quickdraw’ both include the themes of the pain of love. This essay compares how the two poets present the pain of love in their poems, exploring things such as imagery, vocabulary and form and structure.

The imagery used in this verse appeals to the sense sight. This helps the reader visualise what the writer is taking about. It also allows the reader to relate and connect more to the poem.

Imagery is used consistently right through the poem to evoke sensory experiences and to endorse the theme. For instance: ‘A stark white ring-barked forest’-‘the sapphire misted mountains’-‘the hot gold lush of noon’ and many more. All of these appeal to the readers senses and places brilliant visual image(s) in our minds by illuminating the various features of the country, from the perspective of the poems persona. This is attained using; adjectives, ‘the sapphire-misted mountains¬¬¬’, which gives us a picture of mountains with a bluish haze embracing it, this image would thus give an impression of a composed environment and evoke a sense of tranquillity. Additionally by using ‘sapphire’ to illustrate the mist surrounding the mountains we get a sense of Australia’s uniqueness as sapphire is a rare gem. Imagery is also displayed through a metaphor used to appeal to the sense of hearing. For example: ‘the drumming of an army, the steady soaking rain’. Here Mackellar depicts the rain as an army and allows us not only to visualize but get a sense of the sound of the rain, which is presented through the adjective ‘drumming’. This line also presents to us the intensity of the rain again through the adjectives ‘drumming, steady and soaking’.

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

In the first part of the poem the writer shows the difficulty he is having with taking a human life. In the second stanza he says “Making night work for us the starlight scope bringing men into killing range. This dark tone helps to emphasize the struggle the author is feeling as a soldier in war. Also he shows his emotions directly. In stanza 3 he says “The river under Vi Bridge takes the heart away”. This quote shows the feeling that the author gets

The first poem to take a look at is “Nikki-Rosa” by Nikki Giovanni. This poem describes that while some may think that living in poverty means suffering, it actually may be the complete opposite. The article “Explanation of ‘Nikki-Rosa’ by Nikki Giovanni describes the speaker situation the best:

The poem is depicted from differing perspectives, third and first person, in order to exemplify the differences that exist between father and son. The third person point of view is utilized in the very beginning of the poem in order to help the flow and accentuate the differences in perspectives between the father and the son. As the poem begins, the speaker seems to be recalling and telling a story of how a

The attitude of heartbreak and betrayal of the speaker caused by the woman is used to contrast the connotations of the words chosen to build on the irony. He describes the situation as "trustless"(6) and "grievous"(11) due to the anguish this woman causes. The speaker employs such words to make clear the influence that she has over his emotional state. The undertone of the poem, created by rhetoric, is pessimistic as well as resentful which contributes to the speaker's attitude towards the woman. The negative emotions of the how he feels contrasts to the emotions that this woman causes by describing "the gleams which on your face do grow" (4) and her "blazing eyes"(14). Through the use of positively connotated rhetoric when describing the physical beauty of the woman, the attitude of the speaker is established to indicate his conflicting mental state. The speaker creates images through the use of emotionally charged words to compare himself and how he feels about the woman to visual images of his

The poem sits easily on a page and is visually satisfying, although this is in part due to the visual rhymes previously mentioned. This appearance though is false as the poems content is analysed but reinforces the theme of appearance and reality in the 4th stanza. Again, the "controlled" use of structure can be seen as adding to the poems "passion" showing a masterful combination of the two. The repetition of and permutations on the line: "my heart is breaking for a little love" is another structure that reinforces the poems meaning and show the despair that the poem communicates. The move away from the 1st person in the last two stanzas serves to provide a different perspective on the emotions discussed allowing a broader view than if the whole poem was in the first person, again this use of structure emphasises the underlying emotions.

Colour imagery is used in the beginning of the poem as the speaker describes his

The poem begins with the poet noticing the beauty around her, the fall colors as the sun sets “Their leaves and fruits seemed painted, but was true, / Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hue;” (5-6). The poet immediately relates the effects of nature’s beauty to her own spiritual beliefs. She wonders that if nature here on Earth is so magnificent, then Heaven must be more wonderful than ever imagined. She then views a stately oak tree and

Analyzing the first image in this poem shows a perfect example of how this poem carries two opposite tones. In this image, presented in lines 1 through 6, the speaker introduces the audience to the first two characters. The speaker personifies night and day with the lines:

In the third stanza, a lot of imagery is used. The significant ones are present in the seventh and eleventh lines. In the first line, the poet writes, "A

The poet becomes increasingly uncomfortable as he begins to read about specific colors. The "jacket yellow in the green meadow" and the "red rooftops easy to spot in the valley" would hold significance for an audience with sight, but in the case of the blind man, they are worthless beyond their literal meaning (15-16). While the poet may have meant to convey a message to the reader through the red rooftops, his efforts were nullified by the blind man, and he fears that his work is now inadequate. Again, the poet appears to hesitate; he wants to "pass over" the "cathedral's ceiling," "the farewell wave," and "the album with the faces," yet he knows "it's not an option" (19-23). He feels guilty for making his poem so reliant on imagery, and the fear that he is inadequate as a writer continues to

He transitions the tone of the poem from one of despair and hopelessness to one of encouragement which adds a realistic effect to the poem while still encouraging the reader. There is a thin line between being completely discouraging and being realistic; the speaker in the story seems to keep the perfect balance between these two lines. With the skillfully organized tone, the author helps the reader better understand the mood of the story as well as the difficult