Essay on two poems; Prayer Before Birth and Easter Monday

Prayer Before Birth is a poem of eight verses written in a very unusual form with a contrasting number of lines in each verse from two to ten which creates a varied rhythmic affect, this is a prayer and it to has ritualistic quality with the phrase ‘I am not yet born’ beginning in each verse apart from the last. He uses many language techniques to put across his feelings. Similes are one of them; “like water”, the use of this is that it creates an image. He also uses repetition this is used to make a point.

Eleanor Farjeon was born in 1881, she died in 1965. She wrote for children and wrote poetry for adults. Many of her poetry for adults are sonnets. She went through the Second World War and this is what she talks about in many of her poems. She met another poet with whom she fell in love. His name was Edward Thomas and he was killed in action at war in 1917. This is whom this poem is about. She was a friend of both Thomas and his wife Helen and the wife new and accepted the relationship of Thomas and Eleanor. 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, private and simple way. 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, 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.

Easter Monday is a poem of fourteen lines. It is written in two verses, the first verse having nine lines and the second verse five. The poem is unrhymed. It is written in the form of a letter and has an intimate conversational term. She writes as though she was speaking directly to him and she just calls him simply ‘u’ and the words ‘I’ occur several times in the first section.

All in all I thought that both poems were good, but I preferred Prayer Before Birth as I found it more emotional and it had a faster movement to it which got me into the mood of the poem more than the other.