Compare the ways in which Relationships are presented in four poems, one Duffy, one Armitage, one Pre 1914 and one of your own choice.

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Compare the ways in which Relationships are presented in four poems, one Duffy, one Armitage, one Pre 1914 and one of your own choice.

The four poems I have decided to compare are ‘Before You Were Mine’ by Carol Ann Duffy, a Pre 1914 ‘On My First Sonne’ by Ben Jonson ‘Mother, Any Distance’ and ‘Homecoming’ by Simon Armitage.

Both of the poems by Simon Armitage, ‘Homecoming’ and ‘Mother, Any Distance’ are both about the relationship between a parent and son. To be specific the poem ‘Homecoming’ is about the relationship between a son and his parents, how much freedom and trust he receives from them. Whereas the poem ‘Mother, Any Distance’ is about the relationship between a son and his mother and how much independence and again freedom she gives him. The poem ‘Before You Were Mine’ is again about the relationship between a mother and daughter, but here the poem is about what it must have been like before the daughter had come into the mother’s life. The Pre 1914 poem ‘On my First Sonne’ is about a relationship between a father and his son, although the son has died.

The structure of ‘On My First Sonne’ is very simple. It consists of six rhyming couplets, making up just one verse in which Jonson, as a parent, pays tribute to his dead son. This makes the poem look like and inscription on a tombstone. The poem ‘Before You Were Mine’ is also similar to the Ben Jonson poem. It has four verses of five lines each, but there is no regular rhyme scheme. The first three stanzas in the poem ‘Before You Were Mine’ starts off with a reminder of the distance in time between the poet’s birth and her mother’s youth and fun, in the first stanza ‘I’m ten years away’, second stanza ‘I’m not here yet’ and the third stanza ‘The decade ahead’. In comparison to this in the poem ‘Mother, Any Distance’ each word at the end of each line rhymes with the last word on the next line, but this only occurs in the first stanza and the last two lines of the whole poem.

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Each poem uses a different style of language to describe the child/parent relationship. In the poem ‘On my First Sonne’ the language is gentle and calm. Jonson wants his son to ‘Rest in soft peace’ and this expresses his tenderness towards his son and his acceptance that he has lost him. On the other hand the poem ‘Before You Were Mine’ uses more conversational language to convey the idea that the poet is talking directly to her mother. Phrases such as ‘You reckon it’s worth it’ give the poem a more personal feel to the poem. In comparison to ...

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