Compare in detail two of the poems from the section on animals in the OCR anthology
And indicate what interests you about them.
The two poems I shall be comparing are “Snake” by D H Lawrence and “Jaguar” by Ted Hughes. “Snake” is about a man encountering a snake in his water trough. His feelings and possible reactions are conflicting throughout the poem. “Jaguar” is about a jaguar and how the poets moves past all the various animals at the zoo and reaches the jaguar and focuses on its beauty.
I shall cover D H Lawrence’s poem first. This poem is written in free verse, there is no obvious word rhyming with in the poem. This poem may not have a regular form, but the lines were designed to fall that way. The poem is set in Sicily on a hot day. He almost immediately sees the snake at his water trough and almost instantly has some deal of respect towards him. The second stanza of the poem really sets the image “In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree” makes the shade seem almost cooling from the blistering heat of the day. There two was which Lawrence emphasised the long, slow movement of the snake. One is “And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down” and the other, which I see as more graceful is “He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom.” Both of these quotations elongate the length of the snake. The poet then seems to stand and dwell on the snake’s beauty, and is in awe of this creature. The snake however is completely oblivious to the poet’s presence. “Someone was before me at my water-trough” the beginning of that sentence emphasises the importance of what’s is happening. “Some one” instead “some thing” shows that the poet’s respect for the snake has indeed grown as he addresses it as an animal and not a thing. He refers to himself as a second comer, the second comer always waits for the first comer (in this case the snake) to finish drinking before HE goes and collects his water.
