Compare and contrast the views of Autumn inTed Hughes's 'There Came A Day' and John Keats's ' Ode To Autumn'. How do thepoets use language to convey these views?

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Kate Dark

English                

Compare and contrast the views of Autumn in Ted Hughes’s ‘There Came A Day’ and John Keats’s ‘ Ode To Autumn’. How do the poets use language to convey these views?

There are many similarities and differences between the two autumn poems ‘There came a day’ by Ted Hughes and ‘Ode to autumn’ by John Keats. Both poems are based on autumn but they portray it in different ways. ‘There came a day’ presents autumn in a negative way where as ‘ode to autumn’ presents it in a positive way. The reason that John Keats may have written in a in a positive way about autumn is because he was a pre-twentieth century poet and had a love for nature and respect for the countryside. The style in which he writes is known as ‘romanticism’, which is when the poet writes from a personal view, rather than based on facts. Ted Hughes was a twentieth century poet and wrote in a slightly different way to John Keats. He knew a lot about nature and was fond of animals and plants. This could explain why he felt autumn is a harsh and ruthless season, because it symbolises decay and the end of most plant life until spring.

We can tell from the title of John Keats’s poem ‘Ode To Autumn’ that it is a positive poem, and obviously about autumn. The title means ‘to praise autumn’ which implies that it is going to be about the good aspects of the season. However, in Ted Hughes’s ‘There Came a Day’ there is a sense of anticipation and fear about the day. From the title we cannot tell that the poem is about autumn but it is more negative.

In the opening stanza of ‘Ode to Autumn’ the first few lines set a bright and colourful introduction to the poem. It talks about autumn as a season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. From this we know that it is an optimistic poem, especially when vocabulary such as ‘fruitfulness’ and ‘mellow’ are used to describe it.  In ‘There Came A day’, Hughes has a different approach to describing autumn. In the first line, the title is repeated, but it gives us more information as to what the poet is talking about. We know this from the quotation ‘‘There Came a Day that caught the summer.’’ Hughes then describes how summer ends and autumn begins by using powerful language such as ‘’caught’, ‘wrung’ and ‘plucked’. The words relate to murder of the summer and they create strong images in the reader’s head.

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‘There Came a Day’ speaks to the reader through a character in the form of autumn and the author narrates in the first and last stanza. This is a good and appealing way to keep the reader’s interest in the poem. Personification is used when autumn is narrating, vocabulary such as ‘ate it’ and ‘plucked it’ is used in the first stanza when Hughes describes how autumn ended summer. The phrase ‘’plucked it’’ refers to autumn taking the leaves off summer’s leaves compared to a person ‘plucking’ feathers. In the last stanza Hughes reveals that autumn is the day that ...

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