Visiting Hour

The poem “Visiting Hour” was written by Norman McCaig, it is about a man visiting his mother in hospital. This poem is a lot darker than the other and is not humorous, It uses a strong death related word set to set a scene in the readers head. The man is fearful of what is happening to his mother, He walks to her “white cave of forgetfulness “. He gets closer to her but never passing the distance of pain. “Distance shrinks until there is none left but the distance that neither she nor I can cross, telling us in the end, we are all alone. The mother weak and exhausted smiles.

The third stanza goes on to define the pain, only now in more emotional terms, such as "It hurts to thwart the reflexes / of grab, of clutch" (14-15), as well as the pain of continuously having to say good bye, each perhaps as if for the last time: "to love and let / go again and again" (15-16). These lines reinforce the impression that the first stanza's definition of "to love differently" is in fact an anti-freedom or state of emotional anarchy, now using words like "pester" to describe any separation; the poet is compelled "to remember / the lover who is not in the bed" (16), hinting at obsessive tendencies as being possible components of the relationship. We also learn that she believes love requires work, which she cannot do without her partner's assistance, and that this lack of cooperation frustrates her. She believes this neglected effort is the other party's fault by his failure to do his fair share, thereby leaving her own efforts ineffective, the whole of it characterized as an effort "that gutters like a candle in a cave / without air" (19-20). Her demands of this work are quite broad, encompassing being "conscious, conscientious and concrete" in her efforts and optimistically calling this work "constructive" (20-21) before ending the stanza.

Loss is one of the central ideas presented in Gwen Harwood’s reflective sonnet, “In the Park” and W. H Auden’s elegy, “Stop all the Clocks”. Harwood’s poem provides readers with a glimpse into the life of a struggling woman who has lost her identity to motherhood, and this grief contrasts Auden’s narrator who is anguished at the death of his lover.

Everyone deals with it, everyone has experienced it, we all have felt the agony of loss. Many have lost a job, or something more serious, a friend or family member. Life is fraught with loss, and many authors have illustrated that in their works of literature. The main characters in the following short stories experience this feeling - “Gwilan’s Harp” by Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Washwoman” by Isaac Singer, and “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry. These stories show the loss one feels in life, but they also show how loss makes one even stronger. 


Both Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music” and Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” are poems that discuss the emotional repercussions of death and dying. Grieving the loss of a loved one can be an extremely excruciating experience. At times one may feel suffocated by the sorrow and are desperate for a way to find relief from these intense emotions that are apparent in the grieving process. This is where works of literature can be therapeutic when dealing with difficult emotions. Poetry can be extremely helpful in this sense as one of its purposes is to emphasize certain feelings, ones that we feel but are not sure how to process. It can bring to life what we wish we could do or say, but are not able to. By cross-referencing

I never thought the day would come, the day I would lose someone so important to me, my grandma. My grandma was the best grandmother ever, she was caring and loved all of her children and her grandchildren. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has her five stages of grieving that I had went through after my grandma had passed. In the book of poems What Have You Lost, Naomi Shihab Nye selected various categories of poems. The two poems I have selected have to do with the loss of a grandmother. These poems, “Tutu on the Curb” and “Where on this Earth” have different views on the loss of loved ones.

here and there is split up by up and down to emphasise the movement of

No matter how practiced and adept we become at the art of losing, we can never really be ready for the pain of these losses. Those losses will always seem like a “disaster.” The other kind of art in this poem is the poetry itself. The entire poem functions as a coping mechanism for the poet. She forces herself to confront her losses by physically writing them down.

The last two lines of the poem possess an extremely powerful sense of defeat and sorrow.

Nature helps soothe and relieve the and loss of a loved one. In the eighth stanza, an observation is made by the author, where “[he] remember[s] the gradual

Everyone loses themselves from time to time and possibly to the extent of feeling like you aren't going to find yourself ever again. Yet as humans, we all know that loss does not extend to just losing ourselves, but it may be death or selling our souls to someone that eventually abandons us. Undoubtedly these experiences are heart wrenching and grievous, but the pain in our lives is what provides us purpose to change. In the following poems “To a Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan and “Not All There” by Robert Frost they continue to explain the fundamentals of loss through imagery and personification. Simply put, humans all face loss from ourselves to others, but it is this loss and pain that pushes for the purpose to change.

Literature, poetry included, gives us the opportunity to understand a person’s experiences, or at least empathize with him or her. Often these experiences are categorized and labeled as themes; such themes include contrasting death to life, age, and regret. “Those Winter Sundays” and “Eating Together” focus on the death of the father of the narrator. Each poem also details briefly how the narrator has chosen to respond to his or her father’s death. One takes a particularly regretful stance on the issue, whereas the other focuses more on appreciating the time shared. This essay will explicate each poem, compare these explications, and compare the writers themselves.

Metaphors are used within the poem to show the speaker’s mind as they try to overcome the loss. The first three stanzas of the

The astonishing level of agony presented in a person when losing a loved one is described in the poem, “Stop All of the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone” by W.H. Auden. In this poem, the poet describes the pain of ending an intense sensation of love when one of the partners passes away. The inability to cope once one’s love has ended provokes the feeling that life has ended due to the thought of not being able to live alone. This is found in the poem when Auden states, “For nothing now can ever come to any good” (Auden, 16). The author’s use of figures of speech, imagery, and diction allow her audience to understand the speaker’s true emotions over its’ overwhelming grieving period.

Heaney incorporates an irregular rhyme scheme into the poem that mimics the uncertainty or mortality, the underlying theme of the poem. Heaney apprehensively examines the deceased body from far, however, his viewpoint begins to transform. In this piece, a shift from a detached third person point of view to a more compassionate first person point of view. Heaney exemplifies the human desire to understand mortality. A feeling of insecurity evokes a merit of not being exposed too suddenly to the “corpse”. However, as the poem lapses, a feeling of comfort and acceptance develops. We can see that Heaney is able to come close to the body and understand that “fate unwinds as it must,” realizing that death is a natural aspect of life and deviation is