In Morning Song, Sylvia Plath presents many ideas about the birth of her child, and the emotions and feelings that the event brings about.

Transfer-Encoding: chunked What does the narrator of the poem feel about the birth of her child and how does the poet present these feelings? In Morning Song, Sylvia Plath presents many ideas about the birth of her child, and the emotions and feelings that such an event brings about. She uses a variety of techniques to convey her feelings. In Morning Song, Plath feels that the birth of her child is a very precious occassion. She sets this mood for the whole poem, by stating at the very beginning that her child was set going like a ‘fat gold watch’. She personifies the watch with a human trait of being ‘fat’, and creates the impression that her child is expensive and important by comparing it to a gold watch. The child is also described by plath as a ‘new statue’, in a ‘museum’, further creating the effect that the child is essentially priceless and is cherished. The fact that ‘New statue’ is emphasised in a sentence of its own makes it stand out to the reader, and therefore has a powerful impact. In addition, the fact that Plath is said to have stood round ‘blankly as walls’ portrays the fact that the child is the centrepiece of this occasion and that nothing else matters. In this way, the baby is showcased as an extremely treasured item. Plath also describes the birth of her child as a product of nature. Throughout the poem, there are phrases

  • Word count: 612
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Sylvia Plath

This essay is based on the popular confessional poet, Sylvia Plath. I will discuss and show how her poems show strong references and links to her family. The three poems I have chosen to compare are; Morning Song, You're and Metaphors. I will examine both their differences and similarities. In Morning Song, Plath is apprehensive about giving birth and now having to care for a newborn baby. Throughout the poem she shows the baby's magnificence, and emphasizes on how much more important the baby is, "Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue." New statue illustrates to us how magnificent and worshiped the baby is, magnifying shows us how she feels that the baby is huge and magnificent, also confirms how the baby belittles everyone else in the room. She shows her commitment and determination to be a good mother in the 5th stanza, "One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow heavy and floral" This demonstrates her love for the baby, as she is quick to her feet, showing her determination and anxiety about caring for the baby. "All night your moth-breath, flickers among the pink flat roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear" Plath is obviously still amazed at her baby, and during the poem she proves how anxious she is to care for it. "I wake to listen: a far sea moves in my ear" suggests that Plath feels the baby's breath is a soothing sound, like music. The poem

  • Word count: 635
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Cold Knap Lake.

Cold Knap Lake This poem is about an incident from the poet's childhood. Cold Knap Lake is a real place near Barry in Glamorgan, South Wales. It is a Bronze Age burial site, and something of a local beauty spot. A little girl is drowned in the lake, or so it seems, but the poet's mother gives her the kiss of life, and her (the poet's) father takes the child home. The girl's parents are poor and beat her as a punishment. At this point, the poet wonders whether she, too, "was...there" and saw this (the beating, rather than the rescue) or not. The poem is inconclusive - the writer sees the incident as one of many things that are lost "under closing water". What begins as a reflection on a vivid memory ends by recognizing the limits and vagueness of the way we recall the past. In the opening lines, the poet seizes the reader's attention with the seeming seriousness of death. This makes the mother's action seem yet more miraculous. If we assume that the "wartime frock" is being worn during (not after) the Second World War, then the poet (born in 1937) would have been at most eight years old. The mother is a "heroine" but her action has nothing to do with the war. The rest of the crowd either do not know about artificial respiration, or fear to take the initiative. And they are "silent" perhaps because they do not expect the child to recover. The poet notes how her mother's

  • Word count: 633
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Comparing of Newpaper Articles

Comparing Newpaper Articles In this analysis I am going to compare two newspaper articles about a food poisoning outbreak that featured in The Daily Mirror and The Guardian, based on the advice given by Roger Finn. The lengths of the two are quite different The Guardian being longer than The Daily Mirror. The Guardian is written in two columns and is easier to read than The Daily Mirror, which is written in one column. The headline of The Daily Mirror stands out more than The Guardian. For example, The Daily Mirror's headline is written in bold and uses block capitals whilst The Guardian's headline is not in bold and uses lower case letters. The Daily Mirror's font is also much more larger than The Guardian's. The Guardian's language in its headline is clearer than The Daily Mirror's; it gives you more information and a clear message. The Daily Mirror, however uses more emotive language and loaded words, such as 'bug' and 'alert' to leave the reader worried, therefore, making them wanting to read on. The Daily Mirror attracts the reader's attention by using alliteration with the letters B+G 'BIG MAC BURGER BUG ALERT'. The Guardian gives more factual information than The Daily Mirror. For example, The Daily Mirror only describes the outbreak as being a 'bug' whilst The Guardian gives the illness its scientific name, (Eschericia Coli 0157). The Guardian also gives a more

  • Word count: 1138
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Metaphorical language in poetry.

Metaphorical Language in Poetry Metaphors are essential tools in poetry. In the poems "No Ordinary Sun", and "Ron Mason", by Hone Tuwhare, metaphors are utilised by the speaker for different purposes, to enhance images, or enforce meanings; and because they add elements, such as ambiguity, irony, and allusiveness that more prosaic expression cannot. In the first stanza of "Ron Mason", the aspect of Time is personified, where the speaker says that Time `pulls up a chair' in order to pause and ponder the life of Ron Mason, a New Zealand poet, the subject of this poem. A similar use of personification as a metaphor is also used in `No Ordinary Sun', in which the speaker personifies a tree during a nuclear explosion, using imperatives such as `Tree let your arms fall' and `incline a deferential head', suggesting that the tree has a certain degree of wisdom. These metaphors serve to identify the speaker's close relationship with the object by giving the tree qualities that one would usually associates with a human. Other metaphors are used to display further the speaker's emotions, interpretations or thoughts toward objects. In `No Ordinary Sun', Tuwhare says that the tree will no longer be `wreathed with the delightful flight / of birds', using 'a wreath' as a metaphor visually depicting the birds surrounding the tree. In further context, this metaphor demonstrates the

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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The Amazing Individuality of the Life and Works of Sylvia Plath.

Mia Vieira English III G/T-1 Mrs. Navarro 2 April 2003 The Amazing Individuality of the Life and Works of Sylvia Plath Until her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath's life could be described as quite successful. Plath was a true accomplished writer, wife, and mother of two. Her story began on the 27th of October of 1932, where she was born in Boston, Massachusetts. However, her life tragically ended in February 11, 1963, on a very cold winter day when her second suicide attempt was unfortunately successful. When Plath was about eight years old, her first poem was published. A few years later, her career in writing commenced and she rapidly began to write many great poems still affecting readers and critics today. Her poems were published in several different collections, which each volume reflected on a different stage in her life. Even Plath's own friends were often surprised with the effect of anger, isolation, and confusion instilled in The Colossus, Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees, her four volumes of poetry (Martin 2). Her style of writing, which was used in all her works, included the use of rhyme, versatility of form, and a vast word choice. Amazingly enough, Sylvia Plath was able to enrich us with a semi-fictional novel, The Bell Jar, which reflected Plath's life and hardships through a fictional character, Esther Greenwood. The Bell Jar was finally

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Compare poems written by Carol Ann Duffy and Sylvia Plath.

The poems written by Carol Ann Duffy and Sylvia Plath can be interpreted in many ways, but by looking into both poems in a deeper meaning you can quickly see that they are both alike in many ways. The poems have a subject, which is fairly similar, both project imagery of holy metaphors, both within them have many contrasts, and both have the same mood, and many more. Within the poems they are reflective and portray certain feelings to the reader. Each of the poems were written for a specific reason to give the reader an insight to their own emotions, the War Photographer was written to show the life of a photographer who's job was to capture images from war-scenes, and bring them back to England, The other poem, Mirror, written to show the hatred of a poet who has embedded her life into a mirror and hidden her creativity. The subjects of the poems were different, but showed the same emotions of showing images and showing the truth. The War Photographer was a poem about developing pictures, showing the truth from a place that he had been to, yet no one else had. Similarly Mirror, shows the story of a mirror which had captured the truth of a life of a girl, yet also gone beyond the truth inside her real emotions and feelings. Imagery used in the two poems is very similar; both the poems refer to death, and holy objects. In the War Photographer, the poet describes developing

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Sylvia Plath:"Daddy" The poem "Daddy" uses language to a great effect to express the bitterness and frustration endured by the writer Sylvia Plath after the traumatic death of her father. Sylvia's father Otto Plath was a German immigrant who was

Sylvia Plath: "Daddy" The poem "Daddy" uses language to a great effect to express the bitterness and frustration endured by the writer Sylvia Plath after the traumatic death of her father. Sylvia's father Otto Plath was a German immigrant who was a professor at Boston University teaching biology and German. It was said that Otto always wanted a son and when Warren, Sylvia's Brother, was born two years later she began to pine for her father's attention. As a young girl, she was an excellent student and gained many prizes and was very charming and popular however she was also very desperate to redeem herself to her "daddy". She writes about how she felt as she struggled to live up to the high standards set for her by her "arrogant" father. As we interpret this poem, not only are we, as the readers, reading the emotions, but begin to feel them. The frequent use of the word black throughout the poem conveys a feeling of gloom and suffocation: black shoe, so black no sky..., blackboard, black man etc. In the first stanza, Sylvia reveals to us her own "so-called" status compared to her father. "Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot..." Stanza 1, line 2. This gives us the image of a big, black shoe with a small foot inside. It is metaphor for her father, the shoe, and of her, the foot. By disclosing the condition of the

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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Find out the focal length of the mirror through focusing the image of distant objects on the focal plane of the mirror.

C8 The Focal Length of a Concave Mirror Experiment 1 Capturing image of distant objects Aim: Find out the focal length of the mirror through focusing the image of distant objects on the focal plane of the mirror. Diagram of setup: Procedure: . The concave mirror is held facing distant objects outside an open window. The screen is moved between the mirror and the window until the images of the distant objects are focused on the screen. 2. The distance between the mirror and the screen is then measured, and this gives the focal length of the mirror. Precaution: . It should be the images of the distant objects that are to be captured rather than the images of the window frames. Results: The distance between the mirror and the screen where the image is the sharpest: 15cm The range of distance between the mirror and the screen where the image is sharp: 4.5 - 16cm Sources of error: . It is difficult to determine the sharpest image on the screen. We could often find a range of sharp images. Experiment 2 Locating the center of curvature using no-parallax method Aim: Find out the focal length of the mirror through focusing the image of objects on the center of curvature of the mirror. Diagram of setup: Procedure: . The optical pin is placed close to the mirror. The vertical position of the pin is adjusted of the pin so that its tip is at the same level as the

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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How does Plath use imagery and symbolism to discuss the themes of life and death?

How does Plath use imagery and symbolism to discuss the themes of life and death? Ms.F.Pow Rebecca Lau In the poems Tulips and The Stones, Plath uses symbols, metaphors and imagery to discuss her point of views of life and death. She thinks white is color of peace and death, while red it a color of life and excitement. White symbolizes winter, which is also death and the state of Plath's mind. The imagery "look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in" sketches the picture of winter where every thing is still, quiet, and calm. This picture reflects the state of Plath's mind, stagnant. This is also one of the main reasons that Plath dislike the tulips, because the "tulips are too red"; they symbolize spring, and intrudes the "winter" of her mind. The tulips strive for their best to bloom, and that makes Plath feels shameful, since she has already given up trying. This shows that she doesn't want to change her perspectives of desiring death more than life. Peacefulness can be represented by the color white, or death. In the first half of Tulips, she said "I am learning peacefulness" in a place with "white walls", "gulls", and "white caps". She doesn't feel death as intimidating as it happens all around her everyday. She is in a hospital, and the hospital gives her peace, that is why she imagines white as the color of the path that will lead her to eternal

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: English
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