“Half Past Two” and “Hide and Seek”.

Authors Avatar
U A Fanthorpe and Vernon Scannel recreate a child hood experience in their poems "Half Past Two" and "Hide and Seek". In "Half Past Two" there is a boy who has been put in detention for something seemingly not very bad. The boy is young and he has not yet been taught how to tell the time by his teacher yet. This means that in his detention he is unable to tell when it is time for him to leave, and he slips into his own clockless world. In "Hide and Seek" a boy is playing hide and seek with who he thought were his friends, when he is hiding his friends all run off, leaving him on his own. In both poems the children experience lonliness but each in different ways.

The form of the poems are very diferent. This is because the poets are trying to have different effects on you as the reader. In "Hide and Seek" there is one very long, 27 line stanza. This represents one very long moment in the childs life. From when he begins hiding to when he reveals him self to his freinds only to find he is all alone. This contrasts to "Half Past Two" where the poem has a very regular form, having eleven, very regular, three line stanzas. This could be interpreted in more than one way: firstly, the poem is based on time, this is clear from the title, "Half Past Two", and time, no matter where you should happen to be will always be regular no matter what you are doing. Another interpretation for this could be that the poem is set in a school and in a school, bells sound at regular intervals, signifying beggings and ends of lessons and breaks, represented in the regular stanza layout in the poem.
Join now!


In "Half Past Two" the child has been put in a detention by his teacher, although whatever it was that he had done was not actually as bad as the teacher seems to make out. We know this because in the very first stanza the narrator says;

He did Something Very Wrong

(I forget what it was).

The capitalisation of the words in the first line draws our attention to it as we read. This makes us belive that the boy has been very bad if it needs such an emphasis placed on it. This ...

This is a preview of the whole essay