Compare and contrast the way Wales and its people are portrayed in the poems 'Toast' by Sheenagh Pugh and 'Some Christmas Haiku' by Peter Finch.I am going to be discussing comparisons and differences between the two poems.

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Sophie Meecham 11p Saesneg

Compare and contrast the way Wales and its people are portrayed in the poems ‘Toast’ by Sheenagh Pugh and ‘Some Christmas Haiku’ by Peter Finch.

I am going to be discussing comparisons and differences between the two poems.

The poem ‘Toast’ is set in Cardiff. I know the poem is set in Cardiff because the poem mentions some Cardiff streets, ‘Westgate Street’, ’St. Johns’. I don’t think that Sheenagh Pugh cares that much about the stadium because she describes the stadium as ’vast concrete-and-glass mother-ship’, I think that Sheenagh Pugh doesn’t care much about the Stadium because she wouldn’t have described the Stadium in this way. The poem is mostly about the summer. There’s only two lines in the poem which doesn’t relate to summer ‘with November rain, but different, as if the stones retain heat’. The fact that it’s summer creates the atmosphere of the builders flirting with the women and the women flirting back, if it wasn’t summer, the poem wouldn’t mention the builders with their tops off, being whistled at. They were also described as ‘sex objects, and happily up for it’, I think that the builders are happy that it’s summer so that they can get the attention that they are getting. The poem tells us that the builders wouldn’t get mad that they were being whistled at ‘they never got mad; it was too heady being young and fancied and in the sun’. In my opinion a woman wrote the poem because the way the builders were described ‘young builders lay, golden and melting’, If the poem was narrated by a man, I don’t think he would have described the builders in this way. I think the poem is a positive poem because there are not many negative points in the poem.

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I don’t think that there are many comparisons between the poem ‘Toast’ and the poem ‘Some Christmas haiku’. The only comparisons I can find are the fact that they have welsh relevance, I know this because it mentions Cardiff’s streets in ‘Toast’, ‘Westgate Street, St.John’s’ and in the poem ‘Some Christmas Haiku’ it mentions the word ‘Nadolig’ more than once. The other comparison I can find is the fact that they are both modern. I think this about the poem ‘Toast’ because the only Stadium that is in Cardiff is the Millennium Stadium and it was built for the year ...

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