The poem “Carrickfergus” was written by an Irish writer called Louis MacNeice in The 20th Century. It was written in four line stanzas and now I am going to analyse this poem and talk about

each stanza.

In the first line of the first stanza, we notice that the child Louis MacNeice is using specific detail in his poem as he says he was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries. MacNeice was brought up among a lot of divisions and when there was a lot of trouble going on, he mentions divisions in his second stanza when he says, “The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses, but the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.” What he means is that the Scotch Quarter is richer than the Irish Quarter and they can afford residential houses but the Irish live in slums for the blind and halt. The word Scotch Quarter and Irish Quarter were intentionally placed together to show the divisions which existed at the time.

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We can also see the use of onomatopoeia when MacNeice says, “to the hooting of lost sirens and the clam of trams.”                                                       MacNeice says in the third stanza that there was a stinking smell of chlorine and his lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor, from this we can tell that he lived in a industrial town and he doesn’t look it to much as he says the smell stinks, ...

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