English coursework

English coursework Comparing and contrasting two poems from a different culture By Stuart Hamilton Final draft The first thing we notice about "At a potato digging" is that it is set on a farm. This applies to both the poems and we find that they both use normal farm activities to portray much larger events in Ireland's history. In "At a potato digging" it uses a potato digging to contrast against an earlier time in history which was the potato famine, whereas "A difficult birth, Easter 1998" uses the birth of a lamb which is then connected to the birth of the Irish peace conference. In the first verse of "At a potato digging" we are given a description of were the poem is set, which is a farm where the workers are following the mechanical digger as it pulls up the potatoes. The workers are said to "swarm" behind the digger, which suggests that there are many of them and they are quite active. This is a contrast to the past during the famine due to the workers starving to death so there would not be many and the ones that were alive would have had no energy because of the lack of food. In the last line of the first verse we find "fingers go dead in the cold." This seems normal on the surface but we soon find out that it becomes reality later on in the poem. At the begging of "A difficult birth, Easter 1998" it has a common farming activity just like "At a potato

  • Word count: 1549
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Romeo and Juliet

VIOLEANCE AND CONFLICT ARE CENTRAL TO "ROMEO AND JULIET". DICUSS THIS THEME WITH REFERENCE TO AT LEAST THREE SCENES IN THE PLAY. "Romeo and Juliet is a tragic play which is about the death of two young teenagers trying to live happily ever after, but this doesn't happen. However it is also a play about love although there are many scenes that contain violence and conflict. The violence in the play happens because of an argument between the two families, which leads to the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet. In this essay I will discuss the conflict and violence which leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Verona is a city that is divided by civil war between the two noble families the Montagues and the Capulets. Their quarrel is an old one, an ancient grudge. The audience never learn the cause for conflict: it seems to have become a habit to for the Montagues and the Capulets to hate each other. Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare and it is set in the 16th century. Romeo and Juliet has been called a play of contrasts. The two man contrasts in the play are love and hate as this quote shows: "My only love sprung from my only hate". This shows the contrast of the play. When Shakespeare wrote this play Elizabeth the first ruled England. In the 16th century theatre was very new to people and plays like Romeo and Juliet would be s a sort of entertainment for them. In

  • Word count: 1868
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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