Compare and contrast the presentation of a winter scene in Wordsworth's extract from the Prelude and the extract from Cider with Rosie

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Compare and contrast the presentation of a winter scene in Wordsworth’s extract from the Prelude and the extract from Cider with Rosie

        The two extracts I am going to compare and write about are The Prelude and Cider with Rosie. The Prelude is written by William Wordsworth from before 1914 and is written in the style of poetry. Cider with Rosie is from 1959, it is in prose.

        Before 1914 nature was an important part of life, it was seen as magical and very romantic. Wordsworth used many techniques and styles to make the reader feel this feeling of sublime. Cider with Rosie is very different, it was not written in a time when nature was sublime, it is written simply to recap a memory that the author (Laurie Lee) has.

        Laurie Lee (Cider with Rosie) uses a lot more imagery in his writing than Wordsworth does in his poem; it allows you to see what he is remembering. The opening line ‘it was a world of glass, sparkling and motionless’, is in the past tense and is quite effective as it makes the world sound very fragile and isolated. Later on in the 11/12th line he describes the pond ‘Then we saw it; black and flat as a tray, the skaters rolling round it like marbles’  I believe it is quite sinister the way he portrays the pond, the word ‘black’ gives a feeling of darkness quite different from the opening line. The second part of the sentence ‘…rolling round it like marbles’ gives a feeling of wildness, like the skaters cannot control themselves. But there is also that sense of Laurie feeling excited and uncontained, which is then passed onto the reader. On the lines 26/27/28 there is the sentence ‘And you saw deep down… little bubbles like cold green stars, jagged ominous rocks, dead ribbons of lilies, drowned bulrushes loaded like rockets.’ This sentence is very dark, different from all the other sentences around it for the next sentence goes on to say ‘The frozen pond… was a very treadmill of pleasure.’ This is unaccountably different to the sinister one just before it. I believe that this is to show that the children feel safer up above the ice and that although only a sheet of ice separates them, they are not worried.

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        William Wordsworth uses a lot less imagery than Laurie Lee, but what he does use is powerful and well placed. For example ‘The orange sky of the evening died away’  simple yet effective it is also a clever way of letting us know the sun is setting although we already know it is evening time from the 7th line ‘The village clock toll’d six’. Nearer the end of the extract it gets a sense of darkness coming into it;

‘And all the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

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