Compare the works of William Wordsworth and R L Thomas showing whether or not their poems differ in themes and style.

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Dawar Qhoraish               Compare the works of William Wordsworth and R L Thomas                      5/10/02

                        showing whether or not their poems differ in themes and style        

Compare the works of William Wordsworth and R L Thomas

showing whether or not their poems differ in themes and style

The poems of William Wordsworth and R L Thomas are written on the same themes, people, and the landscape but in different styles. William Wordsworth is a romantic poet that writes about the splendour of the world in a positive way while R S Thomas writes about the hardship of the world and attacks modern life and technology. I will compare ‘The Solitary Reaper’ by William Wordsworth with R L Thomas’ ‘Tramp’ as well as Wordsworth’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’ with ‘Cynddylan on a Tractor’ by Thomas.

        ‘The Solitary Reaper’ is a 32 line, three-stanza poem about a lonely woman in the Scottish mountains. The style in which this poem has a slow and quiet rhythm reading style. He portrays this by describing the actions of what the narrator, in the first person, did.

“I listened, motionless and still;”

        William Wordsworth also uses similes to create imagery of a woman singing and working on the Scottish Hebrides. He compares the woman voice to a Cuckoo bird:

“A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard in spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird.”

Here, Wordsworth writes about the high quality as well as the pitch of the woman’s vocal singing to the delightful sound of the spring season Cuckoo bird and so thinks highly of her singing ability. This poem is written in a very positive and written with a lot of imagery. Wordsworth is clearly in awe of this lonely woman who does her job quietly but is still noticed by the poet. This poem is for people who like to read at a slow pace and like descriptive words that create a lot of imagery.

        

        This poem, compared with ‘Tramp’ by R S Thomas, is very different in its style. This poem is on the theme of just people instead of landscape and people, like ‘Solitary Reaper.’ This poem has a rhyming scheme different to the previous poem and is 19 lines split into three stanzas. ‘Tramp’ is about the realisation of the contrasts between the poor and middle class people:

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“My dreams are haunted;

Are his dreams rich.”

In this quote, he compares the dreams of a middle class to a poor man’s dream. The middle class man dream is likely to be negative because he has everything he wants in reality and can not dream for more, so has to dream that he has less or no wealth and/or in danger. However, because the poor man has not got anything solid and faces death more often than the middle class man and so his dream are presumably very positive to reverse his harsh reality. The poor man dreams about ...

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