Compare how Fanthorpe and Scannell present the viewpoint and concerns of a child in "Half-Past Two" and "Hide and Seek".

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Compare how Fanthorpe and Scannell present the viewpoint and concerns of a child in “Half-Past Two” and “Hide and Seek”.

 

Compare how Fanthorpe and Scannell present the viewpoint and concerns of a child in “Half-Past Two” and

“Hide and Seek”.

“Half-Past Two” and “Hide and Seek” are two poems which are focused on one stage of a child’s maturation, both taken from a child’s perspective. Both poems express the feelings and emotions of a child in a certain situation but at the same time contain overtones of the harsh reality of growing up. Vernon Scannell and U.A. Fanthorpe give a removed perception of how a child would view this situation. At the same time both poems give an adults viewpoint of the situation. Both poems focus on a child’s view to make it possible for us as adults to compare how we would act in that situation.

Both poems focus on the experiences of a child which we realise take far greater importance for the child then they would for an adult. This is because the children are being put through processes of maturation. In “Hide and Seek” this is done by putting the child through disappointment, in “Half-Past Two” Fanthorpe does this by giving the child his first experience of abstract time. These are both minor incidents but have major importance to the child. Both poems are similar in the way that they are both trying to show the nature of the process of maturation.

In "Half-Past Two" the explicit idea of the poem is to show how a child deals with understanding a new concept which is abstract time. As the boy cannot express his emotions cogently Fanthorpe has undergone her method of “giving a voice to the voiceless”. An example of her use of this is in her poem “Not my Best Side”. By doing this Fanthorpe has given more depth to the character. Fanthorpe has given the child a voice to make the poem seem less removed and present the child’s views and concerns as if directly from the child’s mouth.

In "Half-Past Two" we see a frequent misuse of capital letters “Something Very Wrong” or “Time”. We notice that the boy uses capital letters for anything that he thinks is important or anything he is concerned about. Fanthorpe has made it seem as though anything the boy doesn’t understand, he worries about and gives it great importance. We can see that he does not know what he did that was “Very Wrong” and he doesn’t understand “Time” so they are given capital letters. It is through the use of capital letters that Fanthorpe has tried to show that anything a child is unsure about will be given importance.

The fact that the child is unsure about what he has done not only gives it great importance to the child but also makes the experience of being a child even harder:

“Once upon a schooltime

He did Something Very Wrong

(I forget what it was).”

The boy does not even know what he has done to deserve this punishment. By doing this Fanthorpe has tried to show the reader that children find it harder to learn from their experiences. The child does not know what he has done wrong and therefore may do it again which implies that the experiences of a child are full of repeated mistakes and then punishment for making these mistakes.

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It is not until the third stanza that the poetic voice finally reveals this to the reader:

“(Being cross, she’s forgotten

She hadn’t taught him Time;

He was too scared of being wicked to remind her.)”

We learn an important fact about the child but we begin to question Fanthorpe because she is giving a detailed process of thoughts in a removed piece of poetry. It seems as though Fanthorpe has based the poem on the past, being the reason for it being so removed. Fanthorpe has tried to express the views of a child by basing this experience on ...

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