Compare the two poets Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage.

I don’t think that this poem really has a message in it but if I had to say that it did, I think that the message would be about the beauty of nature and how we have the power to ruin that beauty, with car exhaust fumes and how we take over the beaches in hot weather, so that they no longer belong to nature. The quote ‘inhaling petroleum’ gives me this impression because the humans are choking living creatures around beaches including themselves and slowly destroying the natural environment.

In this poem called ‘Work and Play’ by Ted Hughes all together there is four stanzas, each with a different number of lines. The first has only eight lines while the second stanza has ten and the third and fourth stanzas both have thirteen. The poet has organised this poem so that the lines concentrating on the daily work of the sparrow are longer than those, which concentrate on the human’s leisure time. This suggests an uneasiness of the humans on the beach. By using very short lines to describe the humans this makes the reader appear to be reading mush faster and therefore become tenser and skittish. But when the reader reads the longer lines dedicated to the sparrows work they become mush more comfortable and relaxed. The first stanza of the poem starts of with describing the swallow, and then moves on to talk about the humans sat in their cars travelling to the beach. The second stanza begins the same as the last, but then goes on to describe the people as they clamber out of their cars and start to walk down to the beach. The third stanza also starts the same as before and then describes the people as they are laid on the beach. The fourth and final stanza begins with the humans leaving the beach and returning home again, it then continues to describe the sparrow, which makes this stanza stand out the most as it id different to all the others. I think this is because at the end of a day at the beach the poet wants to tell people and exaggerate how you feel, to try and side us with the sparrow and nature as a bid to save wildlife and their natural habitats. This poem begins with the sparrow and ends with the sparrow, I think this is because the lines are mush longer than those specified for the humans and ease you into and out of the poem as they are more relaxing. Through out the poem there is no exact repetition but it does keep with the same layout through out and always describes the sparrows ‘work’ as something positive and the humans ‘play’ as something negative. As I have said before I think that this is to get us to side with the sparrow and all of nature.

In this poem, the poet, Ted Hughes has used a lot of imagery including metaphors and similes. An example of a metaphor used in this poem by, the poet is ‘the serpent of cars…’ this is calling the long traffic jam of cars a serpent, which is a snake, and therefore saying the long line of cars looks like a snake as they move along bending around curves in the road. Another example of a metaphor in this poem is, ‘A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage.’ Which has been used to describe the sparrow to the reader. An example of a simile is, ‘Which roll like tomatoes.’ This is describing the humans on the beach as round/fat and red, burnt by the heat from hours in the sun. This simile for describing the humans is very negative, but the ones used for the sparrow are very positive.