The alliteration in the phrase “Shooting down spaceships. Bleep, bleep, bleep! Kill, kill!” which is aural imagery, emphasizes again the violence he has inside him, and also that he is sly.
However, our character is also “cute”. The word “cute” is only used once in the poem, but because it’s in the title, the reader thinks about it all the time. In the second stanza we can see he calls his mother “Mummy” and also he has his “teddy” with him, which shows that he is still “little” and sweet, like most of the children are. When he calls his mother “Mummy” it might just be so she can do what he wants to, like “watch Dracula’s Bribe again”. The stanza has hyphens in the middle which show the difference between cute and violent. Between the hyphens, he seems to be violent and we can see that from the phrase “It’s ever so good when he bites ladies’ necks”, but before and after the hyphens he is cute and sweet.
The boy might have teddies, but he also has video games and he likes winning. “I want to play the video game we bought today”. From this phrase we can se that he manages to do whatever he wants to, he is spoilt. He is competitive with his father, as the phrase “I’ll score three million and Dad will get nil” shows.
The boy is demanding and argumentative. The repetition of the word “want” shows that. He uses the imperative, he commands his parents. He argues and negotiates about different things as the phrase “Go on Mummy, it’s only ten” shows.
Even the rhythm and rhyme of the poem suggests childhood, like a song. The rhyme has the ‘abab’ scheme, which is what usually children like singing. The tone is rather amusing, but it has some serious messages about the relationships between children and parents that have changed over the years.
Now, we have the second poem, “Writing”. In this poem there are two main characters, a child and a teacher. The child has just witnessed a murder scene as we understand from the phrase “and then i saw it saw it all”. He/she has a lot of spelling mistakes, most of the words are phonetically spelled, like “flor”, he/she has no punctuation and his/her writing is messy. These, highlight the fact that the child is in a hurry, it’s panicked and frightened from what he/she has witnessed – “blood and evrythink and mam agenst the kichin dor the flor all stiky and the wall all wet”. The phrase “Dad besid tbe kichen draw” suggests that the child is confused and can’t trust even his/her father.
The child might have been set to write a poem, and writes about something so serious. This suggests that he/she needs help from its teacher. He/she doesn’t know who else to talk to and its innocent mind thought of this way to tell someone about it. It looks like he/she trusts only his/her teacher. But, there is another point of view. Perhaps the child wants attention and makes up the story. This shows that he/she might not get attention at home, so he/she seeks it from somewhere else.
The teacher is slightly different. His/her writing is neat, organized and uses formal language. We can see that he/she is being strict with her students – “Check your spelling and your paragraphs”. He/she doesn’t take the poem seriously and might think that the child has a lot of imagination. That is an unexpected reaction of the teacher. No interest to the child or the scene being described. The teacher doesn’t think of the possibility that the poem is true and might have happened. He/she just checks it – “Is this finished? It is rather short”. This phrase might suggest that he/she wants to learn more about it, if it’s true.
There isn’t any rhyme. This emphasizes how serious this is. Also there is enjambment, which makes it sound more real.
As you can see, there are several ways to present a character. I think the way the poet presented the boy in “Ever So Cute” was interesting, but also the poet of “Writing” presented the two characters in a remarkable way too, regardless of the differences of these two poems. They stay in the reader’s mind, the first one for its rhythm and rhyme which stays to your mind, and the second one for the spelling mistakes, the dissimilarity of the teacher and the child and also for its story.
