Compare the Presentation of Nature in one Heaney poem, one Clarke poem and two pre-1914 poems.

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Compare the Presentation of Nature in one Heaney poem, one Clarke poem and two pre-1914 poems.

My essay will compare the presentation of nature in Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist, Gillian Clarke's A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998 as well as Patrolling Barnegat and Sonnet from the pre-1914 bank.

Nature is a theme which can be represented in different ways. Poets choose nature as a theme in their poems for different reasons. Some choose nature as they see it as something beautiful where as others choose it due to its power to be cruel and destructive. Many poets use nature as a background to a human experience and is often used to represent emotions and events.

In Death of a Naturalist Seamus Heaney uses nature as theme to desribe his change of emotions. In A Difficult Birth Gillian Clarke uses nature as a theme to represent the Irish peace talks, an event which was occuring at Easter time in 1998. A number of pre-1914 poets also use nature to represent what their poem is about. In Patrolling Barnegat the poet Walt Whitman uses nature to show how destructive it can be through a storm and in Sonnet John Clare uses nature to describe the beatry of the countryside during the summer months.

The way in which the poets structure their poems relates to the use of nature in representing the emotions and events of the poems. For example, in Death of a Naturalist, the first stanza is about Heaney's enjoyment at working with the frogspawn, but best of was the warm thick slobber. In contrast, the second stanza is about his change of perception of the frogs as he is now frightened of them, I sickened, turned and ran. Similarly, in A Difficult Birth each stanza shows a different stage of the birth and also peace process. For example, in the third stanza, the lamb won't come suggests that there are difficulties, then in the fourth stanza, the poet says we strain together and the lamb is born. This allows us to see the difficulties of this natural event and it gives us an idea of how hard the peace deal was the negotiate. As the structure changed being the stanza in this case, as does the situation. In Death of a Naturalist his situation changes from one stanza to another and the same occurs in A Difficult Birth.

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Both of the pre-1914 poems also use structure in a way in which it relates to the theme of nature. Both poems are one large sentence with Patrolling Barnegat only using commas at the end of each line and Sonnet doesn't use any punctuation at all.

Although both are similar in this way of structuring I believe it is done for differing reasons in each of the poems. In Patrolling Barnegat the long

sentence is put in place to create a sense that the storm is happening at the present time rather than writing about it ...

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