English Lit poetry essay

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I have chosen three poems to show how the poets convey their themes with the use of meter, rhythm, evaluating imagery and figures of speech.  The poems I have chosen are No Sense of Direction by Vernon Scannell, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, and Goodbye by Alun Lewis.  Both No Sense of Direction and The Road Not Taken are about journeys taken or travelled.  Goodbye is about the last night of a soldier in love.  I choose the poem The Road Not Taken as it was the first poem I studied and felt that it gave me a good basic understanding of poems.  I decided to choose No Sense of Direction and Goodbye because they both seemed intriguing and I enjoyed the challenge of unravelling them with my colleagues. The main theme that connects all three of these poems together are journeys. Some journeys are hard others are easy and the poets convey all of this through their poems.

The structures of the poems are very different to each other and reflect the journeys in each.  If we look at Goodbye, we can see that it is a very conventional poem. It uses the standard four lines on each verse and a combination of 9 to 11 syllables on each line. In Comparison, No Sense of Direction and The Road Not Taken, use an unusual verse structure. No Sense of Direction does not actually have any separate verses and no set syllables for each line and The Road Not Taken contains five lines per verse and nine syllables in each line.

The Road Not Taken is about a traveller, telling the reader about a path chosen which has made a difference to the traveller’s life.  We do not know what this chosen path is we only know that it has made a difference.  The traveller has chosen a path that is un-conventional and this is reflected in the verse layout.  By using the five lines instead of four and no set structure for the syllables, he makes the reader feel uncomfortable just like they would if they had to make a hard decision or choose a difficult path

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No Sense of Direction is mainly about the idea, that sometimes loosing your way can lead you on to better things.  It is a laid-back poem and this can be seen through the layout.  As the lines use a lot of enjambment with no verse structure it gives the impression that the traveller is very laid back about his journey. He does not mind what choices or paths he takes and therefore has laid the poem out to reflect this.  Nevertheless, the poem still does make the reader work at understanding the underlying meanings.  This can be seen in the ...

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