Compare how the poets adopt different approaches to the subject of death
Tony Harrison’s “From Long Distance” is poem about how death has caused him and his father to grieve. Death is approached through the grief of the family and the past tense in the poem. Charles Tennyson Turner’s “On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” is a sonnet about the beauty of a dead fly’s corpse and how death can happen at any time. Death is approached through the ‘book’ and how death is unpredictable. The similarities and differences between the poems are in the diction, rhyme and rhythm.
In “From Long Distance” Tony Harrison conveys death through diction. At the start Harrison describes how the father “kept her slippers warming by the gas”. This evokes a warm atmosphere because the father is doing something nice. However Harrison writes that “my mother was already two years dead”. The adverb “already” conveys the passing of time and shows that even while the father was doing something nice for his dead wife; it is irrational to do it for “two years” and evokes a negative atmosphere because the father is emotionally stressed. Furthermore the father “put you off an hour to give him time to clear away her things”. Harrison is conveying his disappointment in the father as the father is too wound up in grief. However Harrison says “I believe in life and death and that is all” which describes how there is no afterlife but this statement is quite emotionless which makes it sound quite false. Right afterwards this is justified through “you haven’t both gone shopping”. This suggests that both parents are dead likewise with “disconnected number I still call”. Harrison conveys that he is still grieving for his dead parents just like his father. Death is approached in “From Long Distance” through death causing people to show grief in irrational ways.