Life, its problems, the good and the bad of human experience, are major concerns of Simon Armitage's poetry.

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H/W        Sohail Deen 10H        01/05/07

Life, its problems, the good and the bad of human experience, are major concerns of Simon Armitage’s poetry

There are three poems I have chosen to help me discuss and write about my thesis ‘Life , its problems, the good and the bad of human experience, are major concerns of Simon Armitage’s poetry’.  They are the Untitled poem “I am very bothered”, “Poem” and “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You”.

        “Poem” is one of Armitage’s life problem poems When You don’t remember the good things a person has done but the bad things a person has done you remember.  This poem has many lines which start with ‘and’ which is a sort of list of things this person has done.  Also he starts off the poem with “And if it snowed and snow covered the drive” which is like the poem is the second part of another poem or he has left out the beginning and got to the important part.  There are three verses describing things he did.  Mostly everything is good things about him for example “And for his mum he hired a private nurse” apart from the last sentence which describes him doing bad things for example “And twice he lifted 10 quid from her purse” (Mother).  This made the reader only remember the bad things because it was the last thing the reader remembers about him from the whole paragraph.  The last verse is about how people rated him as a bad person who he was only occasionally like everyone else in the world.  There was one sarcastic part of the poem when he said “every week he tipped his wage” and soon after said “what he didn’t spend he saved” because he would not have nothing to save if he spent half on alcohol.  I think Armitage’s poems puts in these sarcastic bits and bad or wrong doings spread over the poem so you are al ways reminded he is a bad person but he is clearly an average person but people judge you on all the things you do so you should be careful on what you do.

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        “I am very bothered” is a poem of the bad of human experiences.  It’s about what you do to try to attract attention which has good and bad consequences.  Simon Armitage shows how he feels about his experiences when he looks back on them.  He feels very troubled when he remembers a time when he was in school as a child in a science lab.  He put a pair of plastic handled scissors over a hot Bunsen burner until it was soft and melting slowly and gave it to a female pupil.  When she held it around her fingers he ...

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