In Two Poems Explore In Detail Lines Which You Find Particularly Striking In Two Poems
In the poems Full Moon and Little Freida By Ted Hughes, and Time by Allen Curnow, there are many lines which are particularly striking. Time is represented by Curnow as everything, from the tiniest existence in our lives – dust, to the largest and most dominating thing on the planet – a mountain. It is personified into one superficial being – something that is responsible for our very own existence. Without time, nothing exists, making it god-like. Full Moon and Little Freida on the other hand, is an instantaneous snapshot of an evening with the poet’s infant daughter. Where the daughter is fascinated by the moon and reaches out for it.
In Full Moon and Little Freida, one line I find most striking is the first stanza of the poem. “A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clang of a bucket – And you listening. A Spiders web tense for the dew’s touch.” This line is particularly striking because although it appears to be a simple introduction, it holds much more meaning. The evening has shrunk not only because the light is failing but also because, as it does so, time seems to slow down, as it approaches that crucial moment of nightfall, the first tremor of the first star. And the poet is aware that his daughter is the hand; pointing to that moment because she is open, without defences, without a distracting knowledge of past and future, to the scene, her fine web of senses perfectly tuned to it. This metaphor of the spider’s web is also a metaphor referring to Frieda’s fascinated mind and how it seems to trap the images around her, as well as it being delicate, being a young mind.
