Compare Nooligan by Roger McGough with Street Boy by Gareth Owen. How do the poets use language to create a vivid sense of character?

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Compare “Nooligan” by Roger McGough with “Street Boy” by Gareth Owen. How do the poets use language to create a vivid sense of character?

The poems “Nooligan” by Roger McGough and “Street Boy” by Gareth Owen both describe teenage hooligans. They both use distinct diction in their poems to project a certain image of hooliganism. There are similarities between the two poems, most clearly in their theme, but there are also slight differences between the poems as well.

Firstly, both poems consist of four stanzas. In “Nooligan” all four stanzas are five lines long and in “Street Boy” all four stanzas are four lines long. Both poems just use only short sentences. The poems flow very smoothly and they both use short words and little punctuation. In terms of syllables, both poems are consistent as well. In “Nooligan” all sentences vary from three to five syllables in length, with the exception of one sentence, which is seven syllables long. In “Street Boy” each sentence has exactly the same number of syllables in each stanza. The first sentence of all the stanzas is six syllables long, then the second sentence is five syllables long, the third sentence is seven syllables and the fourth sentence is six syllables again. The poems being this regimented actually mocks hooligans. The poets are saying that although hooligans are considered to be “cool”, they are in fact, in reality, quite normal. It has come to a point where they are almost expected to be as rebellious as they are and so by making their poems so predictable and repetitious, the poets are showing us that hooligans are actually quite predictable and conformist themselves. Furthermore, in “Street Boy”, the rhyming scheme is the same for all four stanzas. This, again, just makes the poem even more systematic. “Nooligan” also has a rhyming scheme; the same one as “Street Boy” in fact, with the second and fourth lines always rhyming.  

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Everything of significance in both the poems seems to send the message that the poets are mocking hooligans. The words of the poem also are very much mocking. For example, both the poems use repetition. “Street Boy” always uses the word “man” at the end of the first sentence in every stanza, and “Nooligan” uses the same sentence at the start of every stanza: “I’m a nooligan.” This, again, goes to show just how ordinary hooligans really are. In the word “nooligan”, McGough replaces the letter “h’ in “hooligan” with the letter “n”. This mocks hooligans since once they ...

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