I think the poet of ‘Grandfather’ wants the poem to relate to the readers own life and experiences, and for the reader to see the similarity between grandparents in general, and also for the reader to know that someone else has gone through the same thing when a grandparent has died. This is comforting to the reader and thus makes the poem more relative to them personally. The poet of ‘Jessie Emily Schofield’ relates to the specific reader that has that same experience of washing their grandmother’s hair and it that case, would be more effective to the reader.
In ‘Grandfather’ the physical abilities and pure skill of the poet’s grandfather is portrayed through the way ‘he was able to make model yachts’ even though he had ‘three fingers missing’ and he was also able to ‘weave baskets’. Also the ‘long gnarled fingers’ familiarises with the reader, as all grandparents have these types of fingers. The use of the word ‘breathing’ to describe the season Spring, relates to new life, as that is the season in which animals are known to be born, but it also reflects the breathing of the grandfather, and this is contradicted further on in the poem when winter comes and the grandfather is taken into hospital. Each stanza of the poem begins with ‘I remember’, this reinforces that the grandfather is in the poet’s memories now and the poet is looking back at the memories she has of him. The poem begins positively but progresses to a more depressed atmosphere when the death of the grandfather comes about. The fact the ‘wilting daffodils Laid upon his grave’ relates to earlier on in the poem and it’s like the flowers on the grave are an attempt at bringing back the ‘breathing spring’.
In ‘Jessie Emily Schofield’ we see the poet go into detail of a specified event, and we see the manner in which her and her grandmother behave. The way her grandmother ‘would turn off her hearing aid and bend into the water’ is like she’s turning off the outside world and submerging into silence. The line ‘wedding dress silk on a widow’ is used to represent her grandmother’s hair, this specific line jumped out at me as the image it creates is beautiful and moving, and it also informs us that her husband has died, this allows us to empathise with her easier and thus increasing the effect the poem has on us.
I was affected more by ‘Grandfather’, this is because the picture the poet creates of her grandfather reminds me greatly of my own grandfather, as the description is a very general one, and thus many people are able to relate to it. So instead of picturing her grandfather, you picture your own and this brings back a flood of memories you have of your grandfather. I feel the poem is able to hook me in on a much deeper level than ‘Jessie Emily Schofield’, and that, for me, makes ‘Grandfather’ a much more emotional poem.
