To Paint A Water Lily By Ted Hughes

White’s use of descriptive diction creates a pastel painting of the lake and summer. White describes his summers as never-ending and unforgettable. White clings to his ignorance of the passage of time with the “fade-proof lake” and “unshatterable” woods. White instills a sense of nostalgia and reminiscence into his audience through his powerful descriptive

In Julia Alvarez’s poem, On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries, she is able to use imagery, specific selection of detail and tone in order to convey the speaker’s discovery. Throughout this poem, the speaker is meerely in a bookstore and comes upon a book, “Your book surprised me on the bookstore shelf- swans gliding on a blue black lake.” There is a clear use of imagery when the speaker describes what the book looks like, “the swans posed on a placid lake.. Blurred underwater sinking to the bottom,” you can clearly imagine what it is that the speaker tells readers about what they are reading, they say “words rose, breaking the surface, shattering an old silence.”

In the short story "Chickamauga" and the poem "To paint a water lily" there are many similarities to be found. In Chickamauga, Ambrose Bierce tells a tale of a young boy living in the south during the Civil War. The boy goes out to explore the woods and through a series of traumatic events discovers the painful realizations of what the so-called 'real world' entails. Like in "Chickamauga", "To Paint a Water Lily" also depicts two different worlds. Ted Hughes mentions how most people generally perceive a pond, and then how one would perceive it after studying it immensely. You learn that the 'life' of a water lily is not beautiful and calm, but rather the opposite. Both of these narratives dive into the importance of looking more closely at your reality to see what it really is rather than what you think it may be.

“Crossing the Swamp” by Mary Oliver explores the speaker's immersion into a dense marsh in relation to nature’s grandeur. The poem moves as she does, both universally and literally, to emphasize acceptance of having no control over nature’s sublime and autonomy over her outlook when confronting struggle.

Ted Hughes illustrates a vital view in his poem to describe to his audience that what we perceive may not always be true. Often times, the first impression that nature gives is one that is calm and beautiful. However, as the artist prepares to paint the scene, he’s challenged with trying to fit in the entire view of nature. The artist’s task is to paint the water lily, but is having difficulty as there are many other features that are hard to see. Hughes reveals the speaker’s attitude toward nature as being not only beautiful, but also dark and violent.

The memories in the poem maintain a cohesiveness and continuity of experience through repeated motifs such as the violets and the ‘whistling’. Memories also give us a recovered sense of life, as shown through the final line of the poem ‘faint scent of violets drifts in air’. This example of sensory imagery also creates a rhythmic drifting sense linked closely to the “stone-curlews call from Kedron Brook”. It echoes images of the speaker’s mind drifting into reflection and aurally creates transience between the present and the past.

In To Paint a Water Lily by Ted Hughes, the poet utilizes metaphor, personification, and imagery to display the speaker’s attitudes toward nature and the artist’s task. Hughes’ style shows that the speaker is in awe of the landscape, and his task as an artist becomes to somehow capture the entirety of the scene before him. To begin, the speaker uses an extended metaphor to set the scene of the poem. He describes the water lilies as a barrier between two layers of nature.

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

The poem, “Gospel” by Philip Levine gives a vivid description of what the narrator sees around them. The narrator focuses their description on nature. They make many references to types of plants like lupine and thistles. Throughout the poem, nature can be seen as and abstract creature. Nature is giving and lively. The conflict in the poem is between the speaker and nature. The narrator tries to show how nature can give nice outdoor views and how the earth gives people a place to walk on while people give nothing back to nature. Levine’s speaker uses repetition and comparisons to show how nature is constantly pleading for the narrators attention yet they cannot offer anything to the relationship they have with nature. The poem slowly evolves

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’.

Ted hughes uses literary techniques in the most vivid way, to illustrate what his idea of a water lily painting looked like. In all of his works, the goal is to describe a task or a thing, but make the reader understand it by using nature as the key. The task in this poem is presented by the title “How To Paint A Water Lily”. The reason he wrote this poem, was to describe nature by decorating the spirit of the environment around the lily. The two literary techniques that will be discussed in this paper are imagery and alliteration.

Poets use many ways when they want to communicate something using poems. Poems are used as a means of passing ideas, information and expression of feelings. This has made the poets to use the natural things and images that people can relate with so that they can make these poems understandable. The most common forms of writing that are used by the poets are the figurative language for example imagery and metaphors. In addition, the poets use the natural landscape in their attempt to explore the philosophical questions. Therefore, this essay will explore the forms that have been used by the poets in writing poems using the natural landscape. The essay will be based on poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by

Small details are instrumental in seeing the bigger picture. This is apparent when reading “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop. Most often the reader experiences visual imagery in poetry. In this poem the reader encounters visual, auditory, and sensory imagery. “The Fish” is filled with minute details that paint a picture for the reader. With each new element that is introduced, it becomes easier to visualize the fish. The speaker is able to show the reader the beauty as well as the ugliness of this creature with her vivid imagery. The imagery used is so distinct that the reader can envisage being the fisherman and catching this fish. Another important element involved in this poem is irony.

The poem “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” by Linda Pastan is closely similar in context with Sharon Olds’ “Still Life in Landscape.” Each of the two poems narrates an ordeal with the persona being the writer of the poem. The persona directly speaks to the audience. However, these two works differ in the number of lines, the length and appearance of each line and the entire apparition of the poems. The two authors employ a similar tone as both use a melancholic and reflective tone. The poets present their thoughts in a simple diction and understandable language. It is evident that both authors have an impeccable interest in narrating their story.

It is certainly true that one of the distinguishing features of poetic texts is the use of figurative or non-literal language – this essay highlights the fact that metaphors do contribute to the understanding of a poem. Ted Hughes’ poem, Sketching a Thatcher, is loaded with vivid imagery and ample metaphorical constructions which aids to validate this fact. In order to uncover the message behind this poem, one must take a closer look at the arguments, focus expressions and tenor/vehicle constructions of at least six local metaphorical constructions