Analysis of two poems; Easter Monday and Prayer Before Birth

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Analysis of two poems;

Easter Monday and Prayer Before Birth

I will be looking at and analysing two poems which reflect upon the theme of war. I will be looking at their meanings, their forms and show how the poet uses his/her language to express their ideas and feelings. The two poems in which I will be analysing are ‘Easter Monday’ by Eleanor Farjeon and ‘Prayer Before Birth’ by Louis MacNeice.

Eleanor Farjeon was born in London in 1881 and died in 1965. She wrote a great deal for children and also wrote poetry for adults including many sonnets. She lived through the Second World War and many of her poems deal with her experiences of this period. She fell in love with another poet; Edward Thomas who was killed in action in 1917 and to whom this poem is addressed. She was a friend of both Thomas and his wife Helen and the wife new and accepted the relationship of Thomas and Eleanor, but she never the less seemed to have felt some guilt about the relationship. The poem is a poem in which she expresses great love and a great sense of loss, but she does it in a very quiet, personal and understated way. There might be irony in the title in the sense that he is killed on the day of the resurrection of Christ. The last letter she received from him was the one he wrote to her on the eve of battle and though he says goodbye to her which suggests finality he also says “and may I have a letter soon” which suggests clearly that he hopes he is going to survive the battle. She has sent him a gift of a box of apples from her own orchard, she had hidden in this box a special little gift of a silver Easter egg which she wanted to surprise him and delight him with and clearly it is an added sense of pain and irony that what she wanted him to celebrate was the day of his death.

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Easter Monday is a sonnet of fourteen lines written in two verses; the first verse has nine lines and the second verse five lines. However, it does not follow the structure of a traditional sonnet. It is an unrhymed poem. It was written April 9th, 1917. It was in memory of Edward Thomas and called Easter Monday as this was the day he died. The poem is written in the form of a letter and has an intimate conversational term. She writes as though she were speaking directly to him and she just calls him simply ‘u’ and the ...

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