English Literature Coursework - Nostalgia

Compare and contrast three poems from the English Literature Anthology where the speakers of the poems display strong nostalgic thoughts through theme, structure, language, mood and tone of the poems. Three poems where the speakers show strong nostalgic thoughts for the past are Piano by D.H. Lawrence, Poem at Thirty-Nine by Alice Walker and Crabbit Old Woman by Phyllis McCormack. They all display the common theme of wanting to return to the past, away from the pain, loneliness and the trials and tribulations of adulthood. In this essay, I will analyse how the poets convey their feelings through their use of literary structure, theme, language, mood and tone. The theme of nostalgia is expressed through each of the three speakers' different experiences. In Piano, the speaker is taken "back down the vista of years" and re-calls happier memories from his childhood. This happens when he hears a piano being played which is the trigger so that his "manhood is cast/Down in the flood of remembrance". This indicates that the poet yearns for the past and he feels less of a man when he reminisces. It also suggests that when he remembers his childhood and his memories rush towards him, reducing him to tears. In Poem at Thirty-Nine, the speaker remembers how she "learned to see bits of paper as a way to escape the life he knew". This shows that she remembers lessons like the value of

  • Ranking:
  • Word count: 1226
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
Access this essay

Critical Analysis of The Forge by Seamus Heaney

Critical Analysis of The Forge by Seamus Heaney 'The Forge' is a sonnet with a clear division into an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the final six lines). While the octave, apart from its initial reference to the narrator, focuses solely on the inanimate objects and occurrences inside and outside the forge, the sestet describes the blacksmith himself, and what he does. Interestingly, the transition from the octave to the sestet is a run-on or enjambment containing one of the key metaphors of the poem, the anvil as altar: Set there immovable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music. One effect of this is to enable us to experience the anvil or altar as a magical point of transition between the material and immovable world of objects and the fluid, musical world of human consciousness. The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is: abba cddc efgfef, a departure from the standard Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg) or Petrarchan (abba abba cde cde) sonnet form. The unrhymed 11th line He leans out on the jam, recalls a clatter is perhaps the most striking feature of the rhyme scheme, and, combined with the poem's second run-on, serves to emphasise the cacophony and disorder of the remembered horse-drawn carriages. The threefold full rhyme nose/rows/bellows gives a pleasing finality to the end of the poem, especially in contrast to other lines which tend more

  • Ranking:
  • Word count: 1024
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
Access this essay