How Do The Poets Convey Their Opinions and Feelings of Nature in the poems To Autumn and Beeny Cliff?

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How Do The Poets Convey Their Opinions and Feelings of Nature?

Both Beeny Cliff written by Thomas Hardy and To Autumn written by John Keats are poems that express strong opinions on nature by using a variety of methods in the language including personification. In order to communicate their feelings to the audience, both poets take 2 different approaches from one another and in this essay I aim to illustrate them both.

The first poem, Beeny Cliff, is a very poignant poem that expresses Hardy’s memories of a love affair which is never to be recaptured. Thomas Hardy met his first wife, Emma Gifford, while he was working as an architect on St. Juliot's church, just outside Boscastle on the North Cornwall Coast. They were married in 1874 and she died in 1912. Hardy wrote several poems about their first meeting and about their marriage, and most of these poems were written in the years immediately after her death. Using a variety of language devices, Hardy presents the poem in a wishful tone as if to express how much he misses his wife and wants her back. It is a vignette and gives us a snapshot of a descriptive seen over a very short period of time. However, with this aside, the main way Hardy expresses his love for Emma is by using nature to represent her.

Firstly, the title, Beeny Cliff, is good use of imagery as it is very visual and allows the reader to use their imagination to build up a picture of a powerful, natural, dramatic, exhilarating cliff. This image of a cliff is then symbolic for the powerful and dramatic love that Hardy and his wife shared. In line 1, the sea, a powerful and dramatic thing, is personified to again emphasise how strong their love was for each other:

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea” (line 1)

This quotation, along with the use of alliteration in “wandering western” helps the fluency and pace of the poem and shows the reader how the sea was so blue like a precious sapphire, that therefore their love was so strong and precious too. (the sapphire represents the precious memory and precious love)

In the second stanza, the uses of senses is used a lot to make the descriptions of how beautiful nature is come alive. This is slightly ironic too and is used to contrast with his wife as she is not alive and her senses are “dead”. Beeny Cliff is one such poem in which Hardy used the waves, "engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say" (line 5) that crashed against the cliff, as a metaphor for time, which moves forward mechanically, routinely, and without any concern for people. In the poem, Hardy is again on the cliff where he and Emma had once stood, and the landscape is the same, but the waves, or time, has taken Emma to a place where she no longer "cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore" (line 15). In the last line of this stanza, “as we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day”, the theme of nature occurs yet again. Spring (march) represents the idea of new life, a new start and the theme of regeneration. This then symbolises his life, and how he wants to make new start in his life just like spring. Also in this line it says “clear-sunned” which due to the use of a hyphen which creates images and meaning gives the idea of how nature (sun) symbolises his love which he wants to be also clear and fresh in his new start.

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In the third stanza, the language becomes much less formal - a couple of puns are used, and Hardy begins to express more of his feelings. When he speaks about feelings, the language becomes simple, monosyllabic and plain – a state of honesty, or perhaps a state of regret for someone he is missing who is now dead. Pathetic fallacy is made use of with the weather as rain can be seen as ominous and foreboding, which then leads on to reflect the characters. Line 8 could be seen as metaphorical for the happiness that Emma and Thomas used to ...

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