Compare and contrast the poem “Pylons” by Stanley Smith with the poem “The Pylons” by Stephen Spender.

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Compare and contrast the poem “Pylons” by Stanley Smith with the poem “The Pylons” by Stephen Spender.

As one can see from the titles of these poems the subject matter is the same; namely electricity pylons and the spread of them across the countryside.   Both poems are nostalgic about the loss of the countryside’s innocence and seclusion,

The pylons opening up tracts of land long hidden from the urban world, but now being forced into industrial age and being changed by this forever.

In both poems the subject matter pylons are personalised.

In Stephen Spender’s poem in the second stanza ;

“Pylons , those pillars

Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.”

This simile likens the pylons to shameless girls, the pylons are not demure or disguised in any way, and they stand out from the natural forms of landscape. Snaith also personalises the pylons when in his opening line he writes the metaphor; “Over the tree’d upland evenly striding,

One after one they lift their serious shapes,

That ring with light.” The words “evenly striding” give the reader an impression of an army on the move, marching in perhaps a menacing way.

Certainly both poems are written with a sense of regret and foreboding about the future, the installation of pylons is not being celebrated as a technological improvement but seen in a negative light, that will lead loss of a traditional way of life that has gone on for centuries. Spender conveys these sentiments in his opening stanza;

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“The secret of these hills was stone and cottages

Of that stone made,

And crumbling roads

That turned on sudden hidden villages.”

Not only is the secret nature of the countryside implied but also the idea of man being part of that natural world using natural materials for his home, in this case stone, and thereby not alienating himself from the natural world.  But now things have changed as Spender tells us in the first two lines of the second stanza;  “Now over these small hills they have built the concrete,

That trails black wire:” Snaith shares Spenders sentiment and ...

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