Comparative Poem Essay - "About his Person" and "Cataract Operation" Simon Armitage was born on the 25th of May 1963, in the town Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Armitage studied at Manchester University

Authors Avatar

Comparative Poem Essay – “About his Person” and “Cataract Operation”

Simon Armitage was born on the 25th of May 1963, in the town Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Armitage studied at Manchester University and acquired a BA in Geography and an MA in Psychology. After several different jobs, including a probation officer, Armitage decided to become a modern poet and writer. He writes mainly about people and places, and has written many novels, including the well-known “Little Green Man”. His poems and novels have now made him a renowned poet as well as writer.

Armitage has written a book full of poems named “The Book of Matches”. All the poems included are said to be have been written in the time that it takes for a match to fully burn. The two poems; “About his Person”, and “Cataract Operation” are two of these poems. They are very similar in some ways, and very different in others.

Although Armitage mainly writes poems with similar content, “About his Person” and “Cataract Operation” are both quite different.

“About his Person” is about the possessions found on a dead man. It shows that from anyone’s possessions, a lot can be learnt about that particular persons life or personality. In the poem, some of these possessions include; “a library card”, “a giveaway photograph”, “a shopping list”, and “a final demand”. From these and other possessions, much can be learnt about how the man died, why he died, and what kind of a person he was. Although, as Armitage likes to do, this poem leaves you with no actual answer of how the man died, instead, it leaves you with a horde of unanswered questions.

Join now!

However, “Cataract Operation” is about the everyday objects and things, which a person sees for the first time after a cataract operation. The person observes with delight the burst of an early morning. Although both poems talk about objects, the actual objects they talk about are different. “About his Person” is just a list of possessions; “a library card”, “a final demand” etc. Whereas “Cataract Operation” is about normal everyday objects/things from a different view; “the sun”,
”a pigeon”, and “a washing line”.

Whilst Armitage includes a variety of themes in his poems, the themes in these two poems are ...

This is a preview of the whole essay