An evaluation of TWO poems on the theme of 'outsider'- 'Education for leisure' by Carol Ann Duffy and 'Miracle on St David's Day' by Gillian Clarke.
An evaluation of TWO poems on the theme of 'outsider'- 'Education for leisure' by Carol Ann Duffy and 'Miracle on St David's Day' by Gillian Clarke. This essay will explore the similarities and differences between the two poems 'Education for leisure' which was written by Carol Ann Duffy and 'Miracle on St. David's Day' by Gillian Clarke. The theme focused on the poems is 'outsider'. In 'Education for Leisure' the man is an outsider because he is being ignored, however in 'miracle on St. David's Day', the patient is well taken care of but is an outsider in his mind because he is sick and cannot speak. He wants to be an outsider so that no one can notice him. Firstly, the poem 'Education for leisure' creates a negative atmosphere caused by the treacherous outsider. Every stanza concludes with a full stop. The poem has five verses overall. Duffy has written this poem in the style of a diary, rather than constructing the words to rhyme. This is shown by the word 'I'. She has also used metaphors to express the circumstances '...boredom stirring in the streets.' This phrase shows that the day is awfully uninspired and no one is in prospect. This day is like any other day for the man because his life is filled with sadness. He feels uninspired and may feel frustrated due to the 'boredom'. He wants to destroy something, 'I am going to kill something.' This phrase is directly
Compare and contrast Carol Ann Duffys treatment of love and language in the poems You, Text and Name
Compare and contrast Carol Ann Duffy's treatment of love and language in the poems You, Text and Name Carol Ann Duffy's love poem, You, is about her love for a man. The poem expresses the poet's love for the man, and emphasises the fact that he doesn't know about it until the end, where she [the poet] finds the man on her bed. The first word of the first line of the first stanza is uninvited, which is then followed by: "the thought of you stayed too late in my head". This suggests that she didn't welcome the feeling, but instead it overcame her. The line suggests she has been thinking about him a lot, followed by the rest of the stanza which further implements this idea by saying she goes to bed, dreaming of him and then waking with his name at her lips. In this stanza, the poet also talks about the man's name. She shows interest in it, and makes note of the "bright syllables" of it. This shows she is interested in not only expressing her love for the man but also the language. The second stanza is slightly different - we've established she has feelings for him, so now she goes on to talk about what feeling in love is like. The poet writes "glamorous hell" - this summarises love for her. It tells us that although she likes herself being there, she doesn't like the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. The third stanza continues talking about Duffy's love for the man,
Compare How Sadistic Personalities Are Presented in Havisham, Education For Leisure And Hitcher
Compare How Sadistic Personalities Are Presented in Havisham, Education For Leisure And Hitcher In Havisham, Education For Leisure and Hitcher, the poets all convey sadistic personalities using a variety of techniques. All the poems include various forms of imagery that is used to strongly communicate different characteristics of each of the characters in the three poems. In Havisham is a poem conveying the thoughts and emotions of a woman who was jilted by a man on her wedding day. The narrator is stuck in the past unable to move on with her life. She is clearly broken hearted and wants to wreak revenge on all men. Carol Anne Duffy opens this poem with an oxymoron; 'beloved sweetheart bastard,' this strong statement instantly shows the reader that the subject of the poem is bitter and angry and this impression is only strengthened as the poem progresses. Duffy uses a fairly regular rhythm with a range of 9 to 12 syllables to reflect her determination to get revenge. In contrast to this, the poem is written in quatrains, however the second and third stanzas do not end with full stops so are not strictly quatrains. The slight imperfection of this format is reflected in the content. The woman's emotional instability is shown to the reader through Duffy's use of onomatopoeia. In using the word 'cawing' the narrator dehumanises herself perhaps to reflect that she feels inhuman
Carol Ann Duffy - Childhood and Youth
"Explore the way Carol Ann Duffy presents ideas of childhood and youth in the 20th century in at least three poems" Carol Ann Duffy has portrayed her views on childhood and youth in various ways in the three poems, "Mrs Tilscher's Class, "Education for Leisure" and "Comprehensive" Duffy has written about her own personal experiences but has inverted the poems to address the audience as many readers from the same decade would have experienced the same scenarios as Duffy depicts in her poems, this is particularly true in the poem "Mrs Tilscher's Class". In Mrs Tilscher's Class Duffy presents childhood an innocent stage of a person's life where they are engrossed in this metaphorical "perfect" world within the classroom, away from the dangerous outside world. The child is on a journey to knowledge in the last year of primary school and becomes more experienced, and developed through this discovery. The theme of wanting something from life is carried on with "Education for Leisure" where a young person, most likely a teenager is desperate to be recognised, "I have had enough of being ignored". The teenager wants to be noticed and have an impact at school, as presently he is going through the education system with no feeling or desire to achieve anything. In this poem childhood is presented as an isolation from the rest
How does Carol Ann Duffy explore relationships in her poems?
How does Carol Ann Duffy explore relationships in her poems? The poems I have decided to write about are Valentine, Before You Were Mine and Stealing. All these poems have something to do with relationships, but all of them have a different type of relationship in them. Relationship means an emotional association between two or more people. There are still different types of relationships, for example in Valentine it's a relationship between two people that is very close, in Before You Were Mine it still is a relationship between two people but is a distant one, whereas in stealing it is about a boy looking for a relationship. In Valentine the whole idea of the poem is about one person giving a gift to the other, giving gifts is usually all part of a relationship, but below this there are many other ideas. One idea is that the gift is a peculiar one, not a gift you would usually give to someone, that is why I feel that Carol Ann Duffy has called this valentine, because valentine is usually associated with roses and hearts and chocolates, then Carol Ann Duffy goes into the first and second lines with completely the opposite, "Not a red rose or a satin heart" then it goes on to "I give you an onion". This is where the reader gets a shock of 'this poems not what it said in the title'. Next in the poem are the many ideas that lay behind the onion, for example, its layers of
Analysis of War Photographer
WAR PHOTOGRAPHER ANALYSIS - CAROL ANN DUFFY The author of this poem 'Carol Ann Duffy' is a well known English poet. She wrote a lot of poems about varied subjects. She was born in 1955 in Scotland. Duffy's experience in life may have affected her writings in many ways. Her writings mostly have simple casual language and are marked by their philosophical manner. "WAR photographer "is a very eye-catching, strong and effective title. The title conveys to the onlookers the idea and theme of death, war, blood and other such aspects from a specific point of view. The title itself carries the theme of the whole poem and its indirect manner. In this poem an anonymous photographer, tries to capture the readers' attention into the theme of death and war. Throughout the poem, the comparisons exhibit to us the clear differences, and similarities in the subjects in this theme. The poem explores the way some humans care too little for others who are blasted away everyday. These ideas and others are portrayed through the photographer and his job. The first six lines of the poem show the photographer's own ideas .It also portrays the poet's own ideas and how he sees this theme, and this job of photography. The poet shows how the photographer is really inserted into his serious job. "With spools of suffering set out..." the poet uses alliteration, metaphor as well as an onomatopoeic
Mrs Midas - Carol Ann Duffy
Mrs Midas - Carol Ann Duffy Carol Ann Duffy's Mrs Midas is a feminist re-working of the legendary Greek Myth 'King Midas'. It is a dramatic monologue from the perspective of Midas' suffering wife 'Mrs Midas'. In previous variations of the King Midas story there is no mention of a wife. Caroline Duffy creates the fictional persona in order to bring to light a female perspective on the flaws within the male species. The poem contains eleven Stanza's. These have no recognisable rhyme scheme but do feature various plays on words i.e. wine/unwind and possibly contain some internal rhyming, depending on how it is read. The first stanza opens and through the tense used, shows that Mrs Midas is recalling events that have passed "It was late September." This stanza is delivered with a relaxed flowing rhythm that enables the reader to envision Mrs Midas - The Housewife - relaxing in domesticated bliss. This is until the snapping of the twig in the final line, brings both the relaxing mood and the stanza to a harsh and abrupt halt. The second stanza is just as visually descriptive and instantly enables you envision what Mrs Midas witnesses in the poorly lit garden; "Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky, But that twig in his hand was gold." The golden twig stands out sharply amongst its
War Photographer is an anti- war poem.
Rishabh Panchal War Photographer Date-28/4/2012 War Photographer is an anti- war poem. The poet Carol Ann Duffy was friendly with a photographer Don McCullin, who published photos of war. The present poem is based on the conversation that she had with this photographer. She seems to empathize with the photographer and not with the readers. The poem basically is about the feelings of a photographer as he develops the photographs of war. In the opening line itself a depressing tone is set with the help of ‘dark room.’ The word dark gives us a negative connotation and this idea is further strengthened when he says, ‘he is finally alone,’ as if he longed to be alone and wanted to be left to himself for all that he witnessed at the warfront. His feelings are metaphorically brought out when the poet tends to compare his sufferings to that of ‘spools.’ The suffering is immense which is brought out by the use of alliteration as the poet lays emphasis on the letter ‘s.’ The poet has successfully brought out the feelings of the photographer by extending the use of metaphor where she indirectly seems to compare ‘ordered rows,’ with coffins. This gives the effect of death and destruction also of pain and agony undergone by the photographer who has witnessed it. Moreover, the intensity of the
War Photographer, Duffy - Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism 'War Photographer' By Carol Ann Duffy 'War Photographer' by Carol Ann Duffy is a poem written about the life of a professional war photographer. It follows him from the battlefields of abroad to his private darkroom in 'rural England'. As the photographer develops his pictures he is haunted by the wife of a dead man that he photographed dying, and refused to help. When the pictures have been completely developed he takes them to a newspaper editor, who glances over them as if they were family photos. Duffy uses imagery to good effect in this poem. The lines four and five are all one long simile comparing the method of developing a picture to a 'priest preparing to intone a mass'. In the third verse, 'a stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost'. When the reader reads this line he can see in his mind a swirling image of a human moulding into shape. There is also a metaphor at the very end of the first verse. 'All flesh is grass'. This is an idea that occurs several times in the Bible. The exact phrase is found in Isaiah 40:6. The poem's structure hardly varies at all in the poem, all fours verses are six lines long and each line is of similar length. Duffy shows a clear pleasure in using enjambment as she used it in all four verses. In the first verse the reader has to wait until the end of the fifth line to take a
During this essay I will be exploring and comparing two of Carol Ann Duffy's poems, "Education for Leisure" and "Stealing
Comparison between two of Duffy's poems. During this essay I will be exploring and comparing two of Carol Ann Duffy's poems, "Education for Leisure" and "Stealing". In both of these dramatic monologues Duffy clearly portrays a certain persona, the character in "Education for Leisure" is shown as a young adult, that, because he has been ignored, is trying to find power by killing living things. Similarly the character in the poem "Stealing" is ignored and friendless and so resorts to stealing just for the thrill of it, often stealing things that aren't useful to him. The character in the poem Education for Leisure is very egocentric, "I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name" this shows that he really believes that even the air he exhales is important enough to be classed as talent and he writes his name on it as if it was an autograph. He also says "I could be anything at all, with half a chance." This shows that he isn't given the chance to be anything that he wants to be and that he is quite ignored by others. This helps explain why he goes on his killing spree, its probably because people don't acknowledge him that he wants that kind of power of someone, or something so he isn't ignored anymore. The character in the poem "Stealing" is very lonely, when talking about a snowman he once stole he says "I wanted him, a mate with a mind as cold as the slice of ice