Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is one of today's greatest living poets. His poems have the ability to reflect complex issues and themes, like politics, heritage, and conflict. The poems in Death of a Naturalist are centred on his personal search for his identity, and his feelings towards his family. While looking at these poems it becomes clear to the reader that Heaney's Irish heritage, are entwined with his identity, his views, and his family. These issues are fused together with the personal acceptance of becoming a poet and his experience of growing up. I will be looking at the first four poems in the Death of a Naturalist collection in particular the techniques that Heaney uses to present himself and his family, in order to create poignancy and engage those who are reading his work. In the poem "Digging" Heaney describes the deftness and dexterity in which his father performs his job as a farmer. Heaney's family profession has always been farming "the old man could handle a spade Just like his old man". Heaney starts the poem off by saying "The squat pen rests; snug as a gun". This simile draws parallels with the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword", which indicates that Heaney feels as though writing is an effective weapon, and gives the impression of power at Heaney's fingertips. To me this poem seems to be a Heaney writing a justification for not joining the family profession,
Seamus Heaney
Katie E Payne English Language Seamus Heaney Compare Heaney's feelings towards growth and development from childhood to adulthood, using the literary and linguistic devices in 'Blackberry-Picking' and 'Death of A Naturalist' By Seamus Heaney. Blackberry Picking gives a lucid description of basically, picking blackberries. However it is really about hope and disappointment and how things never quite live up to expectations. 'Blackberry picking' becomes a metaphor for other experiences such as the lack of optimism already being realised at an early age and the sense of naivety looked upon from an adult analysing his childhood; "Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not", consequently a sense of regret. Death of A Naturalist is similar to Blackberry Picking in its subject and structure. Here, too Heaney explains a change in his attitude to the natural world, in a poem that falls also into two parts, a somewhat idyllic past and present torn by various conflicts. The experience is almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a plague of frogs comparable to something from the Old Testament. In the first section of Blackberry Picking, Heaney presents the tasting of the blackberries as a sensual pleasure - referring to sweet "flesh", to "summer's blood" and to "lust". He uses many adjectives of colour and suggests the enthusiasm of the collectors, using every
Seamus Heaney: Digging
Seamus Heaney: Digging On the surface level of this poem, Heaney is writing about his life on the farm and describing the scene where his father was digging potatoes. The title 'Digging' is ambiguous and vague. You have to read the poem carefully to realise that all three generations are involved in digging. Heaney's grandfather digs turf, his father digs potatoes, and Heaney himself is digging up memories with his pen. The poem has a powerful opening similie. "The squat pen rests', snug as a gun". It shows how perfectly the pen fits in his hand, and also how powerful the pen is to him, like how a gun is powerful to man. Also it is suggesting that the pen is like a weapon for writing. Enjambment is used between the second and third stanza. He uses it to indicate the shift in time back into the past. It was clear that Heaney's father was skilled at his work - "stooping in rhythm through potato drills". Also the word "straining rump" indicates how old his father has become. He was also proud of his grandfather, "my grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on Toner's bog". Heaney boasts about his grandfathers skills. He was also very hardworking. Even when Heaney brought him a bottle of milk, he drank it very quickly so he that could go back to digging - " straightened up to drink it, then fell to right away". His work was precise and was also
Romantic love, physical love, unrequited love, obsessive love… Compare the ways poets have written about love, bringing out different aspects of the theme.
Love and Loss Romantic love, physical love, unrequited love, obsessive love... Compare the ways poets have written about love, bringing out different aspects of the theme. Poets have written about love in many, possibly countless ways, each of them emphasising different aspects of an emotion which is at once both wide and deep. The romantic poets, who were part of a movement, beginning in the late eighteenth century, reacting against the conventions of classicism, saw the emotions and the senses as being more important than the reason and intellect that had been typical attributes of classicism and used their poetry as a means of expressing the power of the human imagination. I have studied many love and loss poems including, "First Love" by John Clare, "When We Two Parted" by Lord Byron and "A Woman To Her Lover" by Christina Walsh. In "First Love" by John Clare, we see two main types of love, obsessive love and physical love. We can see physical love as the poet talks about and describes his lovers face. "Her face it bloomed like a sweet fire", this shows how the poet sees the girl. The poet later says "I never saw a face so sweet". The word "sweet" is repeated a few times in this poem, by which the idea of "sweet" is made stronger, and therefore shows obsessive love. The very personal view of love and its impact on the individual that we see in "First Love" can be
Poetry From Other Cultures
Laura Jeacock Poetry from Other Cultures What is a culture? Culture is the full range of learned human behaviour patterns. The 2 poems I am going to compare are Vultures and Nothings Changed. Vultures was written by a Nigerian tribesman named Chinua Achebe. Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria in 1930. He was christened as Albert Achebe. He is one of the most admired African novelists who writes in English. On the other hand, Nothing's Changed was written by Tatamkhula Afrika, born in Egypt and came to South Africa as a child. Nothing's Changed is an autobiographic poem and follows the journey of Afrika as he returns back to his home town after the Apartheid is over. However, he fails to see how the abolishment of the Apartheid has changed District Six of Cape Town, where he lived as a child and grew up, as there is still a division between the whites and blacks. This is shown by comparing the posh "whites only inn "and the "working mans cafe selling bunny chows". Whereas Achebe's poem, Vultures, give us an insight into how 2 different sides of people or animals can exist. The vultures of the title may be birds of prey but Chinua Achebe used to represent people of a certain kind. Achebe kinks his poem to World War 2. He wrote Vultures shortly after the end of the war. H makes references to "Belsen Camp, "trench" and other words that can symbolise evil or relate to the war.
Poetry of the first world War
Dawn Dunston Assignment One Poetry of the First World War 1914 to 1918 World War One, also known as The Great War took place primarily in Europe from 1914 to 1918. It claimed the lives of millions and resulted in millions of casualties. It is all too often forgotten but when remembered, it is remembered with great sadness. It is hard to imagine that anything beautiful could materialize from this horrific conflict but something did. It inspired and produced some of the Worlds most famous poets who wrote powerful poems about the everyday reality of this epic event. The three poems that I will analyse for this essay are 'War Girls' by Jesse Pope, 'Breakfast' by Wilfred Wilfred Gibson and 'There will come soft rains...' by Sara Teasdale. All three poems depict their inner feelings and own personal views of the war and their views are conveyed with the use of powerful imagery. As the title suggests in Pope's 'War Girls' the poem is about the lives of woman during World War One. The characters are addressed as girls 'the motor girl', 'the butcher girl', giving an image of these woman being very young but very mature. An upbeat tempo has been used and with the description of the jobs that woman did, 'drives the heavy van', 'does a milk round in the rain' it conveys a sense of action. The lines, 'beneath each uniform, beats a heart that's soft and warm', is an example
The speckled band and The lamb to the slaughter
Both the speckled band and the lamb to the slaughter are murder mysteries. They involve a murder but in the speckled band you are trying to work out who did the murder and how. In the lamb to slaughter, you know who did the murder but you do not know if she gets away with it. The stories have a good pun in their titles. They are ambiguous because they mean different things. In the lamb to slaughter the title usually means a little innocent lamb going to get killed like the man gets killed and he has no idea, But it also refers to the comic way to the piece of lamb that is used to slaughter him. The speckled band has a red herring type of title. It leads you off the plot. You would think you wear a speckled band. There are gypsies staying in the premises and they would wear a speckled bandanna, you might think that they killed Helen but you later find out that the snake was the murderer. Sherlock Holmes is a very clever man compared to the police. He is very good at making deductions like when he says ' you have come in by train this morning I see' then you later find out that he just sees the second half of a return ticket in the palm of her hands. He also pays a lot of attention to detail as shown when he notices the dummy bell rope, the ventilator that does not ventilate, and the bed is bolted to the floor. He is an intelligent man because he does not say if he has any
The poems'
English Essay The poems' "Valentine" and "In Mrs. Tilchers' Class" both experience dramatic change throughout the course of their poems. They are both very similar in their structure because they both start off in a very positive way. For example the poem "Valentine" uses the words 'Red rose' and 'satin heart' in the first line, which also is the first stanza. Like this, in the poem "In Mrs. Tilchers' Class" the word 'laugh' is used in the first stanza. From this we can see that both poems are conforming to normal standard, by starting off very positively. In "Valentine" Carol Ann Duffy starts off the poem by describing the state of the relationship and uses the words 'like the careful undressing of love' to create a simile of sexual nature. As the poem progresses, we find out that Carol Ann Duffy is, in fact, ending the relationship with the person concerned. She uses phrases like 'possessive' and 'lethal', which certainly does not conform to most Valentine poems of today. Unlike the beginning of the poem where she uses a lot of very "loving" words like 'truthful' and 'lover', towards the end she talks about how the scent of the onion will 'cling to your knife'. The word 'knife' is the keyword in this line, and Carol Ann Duffy has purposely chosen it because it is not usually linked with Valentine poems. The word is a strong contrast towards the beginning of the poem.
What were they like
What Were They Like The Poem we have studied is 'What Were They Like' which was written in the 1960's by Denise Levertov. Denise Levertov was a anti war protester, who protested about the loss of the Vietnamese culture and the cruelty of the Americans. The structure of the poem was written in questions then answers as she wanted us to think about the questions then look at the answers after. Denise Levertov emphasises about the disaster which was caused by the Americans which left the people of Vietnam devastated. In the first question Denise Levertov tries to tell us that the people of Vietnam lived a simple life "did the people of Vietnam use lantern or stones". Denise levertov tries to tell us that the people of Vietnam had hardly any money let alone electricity. Vietnam was isolated from the advanced countries such as America, United Kingdom and much more. This brings sympathy from the readers towards the people of Vietnam, as thinks makes the reader feel very saddened by what happened to all those happy villagers. In the answer 1; Denise levertov tells us that darkness came across the Vietnam "Sir, their light hearts turned to stone". Denise Levertov uses the words "Lights hearts" to tell us that the Vietnamese people were kind, calm and peaceful people. Then Levertov uses the word "Stone" to emphasise the fact that their lives came to an unexpected end. In the second
Trace the history of 'the old lie with particular reference to the poetry of Wilfred Owen
Trace the history of 'the old lie with particular reference to the poetry of Wilfred Owen 'The old lie' is Wilfred Owen's re-labelling of Horace's epitaph "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". This is a Latin phrase, which translates to "it is sweet and honourable to die for your country". Owen has dubbed this epitaph "the old lie" as he completely disagrees with it. He has witnessed first hand what the conditions during war were really like, the full horror and degradation which the soldiers experienced. During Roman times, war was very noble and honourable as in battle the most skilled fighters won. During the First World War however, even the most skilled soldier could be killed by an invisible, unknown opponent firing a shell. He felt war wasn't "sweet and honourable" anymore like Horace wrote - but bitter and undignified. Thus he renamed it 'The old lie'. When Tennyson wrote 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', during the Crimean war in 1854, most people's perceptions of war were still similar to that of Horace's - that it was noble and courageous. Many were very patriotic and so respected the soldiers fighting in the war, as they were defending the country and being honourable and gallant. Tennyson didn't take part in the war, and therefore was not exposed to its true horrors. He could only write from other people's accounts of the Crimean war, which were evidently
