Year 10 GCSE Coursework Essay
From reading ‘On My First Sonne’ by Ben Johnson and ‘Mother Any Distance’ by Simon Armitage I can see that both of these poems are based on a parent/ child relationship. There are two main types of relationships one is where two things interact an example of this could be a car on a road. This would show us how us how the two things would fit with each other. The other type of relationship which we could have would be things such as Marriage, by Blood etc. In the Poem Mother Any Distance the relationship in it is both of those two described above because there is a relationship between the two people which is very straight forward who could be measuring and there the close relationship between the mother and son by blood. In Mother Any Distance both of the parties are still alive therefore the relationship between the two parties is able to continue, therefore the relationship between the two is able to change through out their live. Where as in On My First Sonne one of the parties is dead this then leading into a fixed relationship between the two existing in the memory of one.
By looking at both of these poems I can see that the structures of these two poems are completely different. When looking at it for the first time you can clearly see that Mother Any Distance has three stanzas where as On My First Sonne there is only one stanza. By reading the poem On My First Sonne the one stanza completely makes sense, but if you just read one stanza in isolation in Mother Any Distance you can get different views about the situation depending on which stanza you read. If you read all three stanzas (as the poet intended), it changes again showing that there is a relationship between the three stanzas. In On My First Sonne you can see that there are rhyming couplets throughout the poem. Whereas in Mother Any Distance there is only two sets of rhyming couplets this is at the end of the first stanza and at the end of the third stanza which seems to finish the poem with a flourish. In this poem I can see that there are internal rhymes some of the lines rhyme and some do not. Old things such as God and fate are used in the poem On My First Sonne. This shows us that this poem is older than Mother Any Distance. In Mother Any Distance things are slightly more modern such as ‘Space Walk’. On My First Sonne there is a lot of rhetorical questions such as ‘ O, could I loose all Father, now.’ There is a use of enjambment in the one poem Mother Any Distance
