The poems On my first Sonne by Ben Jonson and Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy both make the reader feel sympathy for the speaker. This is represented in different ways in each poem by using their sympathetic language to show this.

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  1. Compare how the poets make the reader feel sympathy for the speaker in ‘On my first Sonne’ by Ben Jonson and the speaker in one poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

The poems ‘On my first Sonne’ by Ben Jonson and ‘Stealing’ by Carol Ann Duffy both make the reader feel sympathy for the speaker. This is represented in different ways in each poem by using their sympathetic language to show this.

Jonson starts his poem straight away making the audience feel sympathy. “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee.” This gets straight to the point of the poem and signifies to the audience what this poem is about and the emotion they should be feeling when reading it which is this case is sympathy for the speaker. This is very similar to ‘Stealing’ where in the third line it says “I wanted him, a mate.” This shows that the narrator in this poem is lonely and clearly has no friends. This automatically does the same thing to us as ‘On my first Sonne’ and makes us feel sympathy for him. This point about wanting a friend also crops up again in line 8 where it says “frozen stiff, hugged to my chest.” The person in the poem hugged him hinting again to him wanting a friend.

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In ‘On my first Sonne’ the narrator talks about pain to someone else which itself causes the reader to feel sympathy for the person feeling this pain. For example the poem talks a lot about the father’s pain but the final line says “As what he loves may never like too much.” Here the father decides he’ll never love anyone else so dearly because he doesn’t want to feel so much pain again. This thought of causing pain is also shown in ‘Stealing’ where it says “Part of the thrill was knowing that children would cry in the morning. Life’s ...

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