Heaney expresses another aspect of country life in his words like “grow up and plough” and “follow in his broad shadow”. This aspect refers to the bonds between people, and in this case, they are great. Heaney wanted to grow up and plough like his father, and so we can extract from this that country life was fun at times, but it was really about families, because it can get lonely on a farm in the middle of nowhere. It tells us that following in your fathers footsteps was the done thing in the country. However, here, it is clear to see that Heaney is not just describing any father-son relationship, but a very special one, and Heaney is seen to be very much in awe of his father, “All I ever did was follow...” This serves to illustrate more the skill of the father because later on in the poem, Heaney says that “I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, yapping always” and for the father to produce such perfect work in the face of the distraction Heaney caused shows the reader that, through the image of a small boy tagging along, country life can be very trying and stressful at times.
There is use of specialized words such as ploughing, wing, and headsock. There are also active verbs used such as rolled, stumbled, tripping, falling, yapping. There are some onomatopoeia words such as clicking, plucking and yapping. The meter is more or less iambic and rhymed in quatrains. There isn’t any personification. Alliteration, ‘ The sweating team turned ’ it is technically alliteration but of no real value to the poem.
When I read the poem it didn’t really have any effect on me although I did sympathises and was interested by Heaneys reminisce.
The next poem that I will look at by Heaney is ‘ An Advancement of Learning ‘.
This poem is about an encounter with a rat one day. It is a poem about facing your fears. It is a poem about the experiences of childhood and how these experiences affect us and the way we look at life, which is a frequent theme in Seamus Heaney’s poems. It seems that at some point during Heaney’s Childhood he had a bad experience involving rats and so this poem is facing his phobia of them. The poems mood is, whilst he is describing the rat, rather sinister. For the first two stanzes it is a pretty average mood nothing wrong, nothing right but as soon as he sees the rat he is petrified. Whilst he is describing it he uses words which are unnatural to describe the very natural rat. It is mildly paradoxical. Which is a style Ted Hughes is very favourable of, as we will see later on. ‘Ears plastered down on knobbed skull’ Are very unusual words with which to describe a rat. He stares the rat out and during those moments the mood is very tense. The poem finishes with a feeling of triumph. He has finally confronted his phobia. The voice in the poem is again Seamus Heaney’s and the whole poem is a metaphor for facing your fears.
Another very important part of this poem is the bridge. The bridge represents his fear. In the first stanze we see this. ‘(Always deferring the bridge)’ That is because of his fear and we know, by the en that he has conquered his fears because he says, ‘Then I walked on and crossed the bridge’.
During the poem what I noticed first about the use of language was that hardly any of the imagery throughout the poem, despite it being a poem about nature is natural imagery. Let us first look at stanze 1. He personifies the river, ‘the river nosed past’ then he describes it using some very unnatural imagery.’ Pliable, oil skinned, wearing’ Are all attributes not usual used to describe a river. These images but an unpleasant and cautious spin on the proceedings the environment does not sound natural or identifiable and so we proceed with caution in unknown territory.
The rhythm and rhyme are very typical of Heaney. He tends to use conversational rhythms in his poetry rather than a meter. He is also a very tactile poet. He likes to evoke a sense of touch in his poems.
The next Poet that we will look at is Ted Hughes and the first poem ‘Roe Deer’
This is a poem again about an encounter with an animal, but Hughes tackles it in a very different way from Heaney. The Voice of this poem is Hughes’ and it is about him driving (however this isn’t explicitly stated) down a country lane when he sees two deer in the road he carries on towards them waiting for them to move out of his way. They just stand there until the last minute and then they run away. This in itself isn’t all that exciting an experience, but it’s the way I which Hughes describes it which makes it interesting. Right from the start we know this is not a normal day, ‘Biggest snow of the year’. So what we would have thought to be a normal event is no longer just that. And we know that something strange as happened because of the last line, ‘ Back to the ordinary’. This tells us that there was more to the encounter than first meets the eye. The whole poem is very paradoxical. ‘Two blue dark deer’. Well deer aren’t blue or dark normally. And throughout the poem the snow transforms simple things. ‘The deer had come for me’. Well they obviously hadn’t really come for him, he is imagining it, but it adds to the overall confusion and abnormality of the poem.
It is made more intriguing when, in line10 ‘To remember the password and sign’. The word password suggests mystery and disguise and the word sign suggest that maybe the deer have their own language and symbols. Deer are supposed to be a picture of innocence and have a very innocent appearance but during this poem they are made to be rather sinister and strange. I think that maybe the message Hughes is trying to get across is that things are not always what they seem. The level of unreality present in the poem further proves this. ‘Trees were no longer trees’ ‘nor the road a road’. There is also the feeling that animals perceive events in their own way and do have very high intelligence. The mood of this poem is very strange indeed and at some points sinister. There is no discernable rhyme scheme in this poem and it uses mainly an iambic meter.
There is an important contrast between snow and the dark deer. I think this is to make a contrast between the ordinary daytime world and the strange night time world. I think that the theme of this poem is, things aren’t always what they seem. There is juxtaposition of words for contrast and paradox throughout the poem. Hughes is a big fan of paradoxical poetry as we will see in the next poem ‘Harvest moon’ I’m not a big fan of Roe deer and I think that it tries to be too weird for its own good at times.
Like in Roe Deer Parody features heavily in this poem too ‘Harvest moon’ too is very strange and features some very abnormal imagery from the very start. ‘ The flame red moon ‘. The moon, we know is white and already we know this is going to be a paradoxical poem. Then he uses the image of the moon sinking upwards like a gold doubloon. A doubloon is a gold Spanish coin and I think the image of sinking upwards is a very successful one. I think he is trying to describe what it is like when you drop a coin in a pool of water and it sinks to the bottom, if you look at it upside down then it appears to be sinking upwards. That’s why he used the image of the gold doubloon alongside that of sinking upwards
He says that the harvest moon booms softly but we know that the moon is silent. That is a feature associated closely with the moon and Hughes turns it on its head. Then he says the moonlight cows and sheep stare up and are petrified by the moon which is very strange because the moon isn’t a frightening thing although it does have a surprising amount of control over the world which we live in, it controls the oceans, which take up two – thirds of our worlds surface so if something like that were to turn against us it could be very damaging indeed, I believe that this makes it slightly sinister. But the really disturbing part is in the last stanze when the gold fields of stiff wheat cry out, ‘ We are ripe, reap us!’ this is personifying the wheat and making it fear the moon. This adds to the suggestion of evil surrounding the moon throughout the poem. The imagery is very bizarre and not always pleasant, ‘Rivers sweat from the melting hills’ is one example of unpleasant and peculiar imagery. The rhyme scheme used in this poem is 1, 2, 1, 3, 1 in the first stanze. 1, 2, 1 in the second stanze. 1, 1, 2, 3 in the third stanze. 1, 2, 3, 4 in the fourth stanze and 1, 2, 3 in the fifth. This extremely eccentric rhyme scheme adds to the abnormality and weirdness of the poem. There is really no meter to speak of and I think that this mixture of eccentric rhyme and no specific meter works very well in a paradoxical poem. It all adds to the sense of chaos. The voice of the poem is just an observer I don’t think that it is anyone imparticular because it is just a description of the events.
Traditionally harvest time is a time of great happiness and joy when you reap the rewards of a good season and all the hard work you have put into the land. But it has been portrayed, by this poem as a time of strange chaos. Compare this description of country life to those of Heaneys and you will see that there is a great difference between their writing styles. There is some onomatopoeia such as ‘Hush’. But this doesn’t really have an effect on the overall poem.
I think that this poem is successful, in that it makes you think. Again I think the theme is that things aren’t always what they seem but I think that this poem is a lot darker than ‘Roe Deer’ and I believe it is a better poem for it. Both are strange but I think that ‘Harvest moon’ has more substance and successful imagery than ‘Roe Deer’. Hughes as we have seen has a very paradoxical view on nature and certainly holds the thought that there is much more to nature than meets the eye.
The next poet who we will look at is Sylvia Plath. She was a very strange women and eventually committed suicide in 1963 after a long period of mental illness and severe depression. The first poem which we will look at by her is ‘Mirror’. This is a Poem about a mirror and a lake but it is really a metaphor for something a lot deeper. I think that Plath is trying to discover herself and I think, she also thinks about death. It is written almost like a riddle with. ‘I’ used regularly. During this poem Plath is the mirror and also the person looking into it. It is the description of the life of a mirror and Plath makes it out to be a very submissive and not very nice one. The description of the wall the mirror looks upon year after year is, ’ It Is pink, with speckles’. This may be a reference to ‘Salmon’ pink. Salmon are fish that make a long uphill struggle to spawn their eggs and then they die. This could very well be a description of what Plath perceives to be her own life. That is quite a weak link but entirely possible. ‘Whatever I see I swallow immediately/Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike’. " The mirror reflects only what it sees and does not seem to infuse any "meaning" into it. It is the cold, hard truth that can be very hard to deal with and indeed the woman "turns to those liars, the candles or the moon." But the mirror nonetheless sees "her back, and reflect it faithfully." The mirror takes what it is given and is submissive. The woman the mirror speaks of in the poem seems to be denying her "true" self, and does get lost in false illusions but always the truth follows her. There is no escape. But all she can reward the mirror with are "tears and an agitation of hands." The truth is important to her yet she "comes and goes." The last two lines of the poem "In me she has drowned a little girl, and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish." This can be read as though the woman was forced to grow up too fast and she has trouble dealing with the fact that her childhood was "stolen" from her. She was forced to grow up and with age her innocence and beauty is lost, and reality "Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish." The death of her father while she was still a child may have been what she meant about being forced to grow up too quickly, if this poem really is about Plath. The tone of the poem is, I think, sad. It is about seeing things for face value. There is something else which I notice about the poem and that is, the poem becomes a mirror, not of the world but of other mirrors and If Plath is the mirror and the woman bending over the lake is Plath then the mirror is being reflected by the lake and if a mirror is reflecting a mirror then only mirrors and reflections are visible. I think this is maybe one of Plaths views on life. That everything is a reflection and nothing is real or sincere. I believe that the voice in this poem is that of Plath.
She writes about nature obviously as the lake and like her husband in ‘harvest moon’ personifies it. In this poem the lake is a truthful being. But holds many dark secrets. I don’t think we can say that the lake is evil. But it is mysterious. She uses the moon as an image and labels it as a liar. The final image of the poem is a fish, which is part of the natural world. The fish, I believe, represents reality. Which is getting closer and closer. I think that it may also symbolize Plath’s death as this was written shortly before her suicide. Maybe she knew that she was going to do it? And wrote this poem to explain.
There is no rhyme scheme in this poem. And the meter is iambic. The imagery is quite dark words like cruel, darkness, separate, agitation, terrible. But it doesn’t go over the top and sounds very much like a normal riddle until the last two lines of the poem when its true meaning comes out. This poem personifies the lake and the mirror, which is unnatural but not paradoxical. I enjoyed the poem and I think that it is successful, although the true meanings may be too deep for anyone except for Plath herself to be able to comprehend.
The second poem and final poem which I am going to look at by Plath is ‘Blackberrying’.
It is a poem about her again and it is while she is out picking blackberries. The tone of this poem is loneliness. She is out on sunny day, on a country path by the coast and is completely alone. There is also an ominous tone in the poem as we can see from the description of the blackberries and blackberry bushes themselves. ‘Ebon in hedges, fat’ Fat is an unpleasant word and it describes an excess of something. In the first four lines she says the word blackberry four times so she is really trying to get us to notice them. Then she says, ‘ I had not asked for such blood sister hood, they must love me ’. This is a sarcastic comment n reference to the fact that when you pick blackberries they’re juice gets on your hands and looks a bit like blood. Some people are blood brothers or sisters and they do this by cutting themselves and mixing their blood. She thinks that the blackberries are doing the same and must love her if they want to be blood sisters. She is of course being sarcastic. ‘ They accommodate themselves to my milk bottle, flattening their sides ‘. This is another unpleasant image of squashed berries. Al this with the description of the berries themselves give a felling of over ripeness and sickly sweetness which can be compared to a poem written by John Keats in the 19th century ‘ To Autumn ‘. In that poem too there is very much an over-ripeness. Her description of the lane too. ‘ A blackberry alley, going down in hooks ‘. The hooks may be a reference to her own life. Which took many twists and turns.
In Stanze two she mentions the crows. Crows were a favourite image of her husband, Ted Hughes and it is possible that this may have been his influence over her work. She describes them as cacophonous which is almost headache inducing sound. This adds to the unpleasantness. She says they are protesting about something. She doesn’t think that she will make it too the sea at the end of the hooked alley and if we are to believe that this poem is to do with her life then she was correct, she never saw her natural end because she killed herself. ‘ I come to one bush of berries so over ripe it is a bush of flies ‘ more sickly sweetness. Here there is a paradoxical edge because whilst she is describing the berries as over ripe and sickening she describes the flies and makes them sound beautiful. ’ Hanging their blue green bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen ‘ this too is slightly sickly but is a nicer description than that of the berries.
In the last stanze she rounds the last hook and should come to the sea but instead there is nothing. I think that maybe, if this was a poem relating to her life she thought that, just like in the poem there was nothing after life, and maybe that would explain why she killed herself.
The imagery throughout this poem is rather repulsive. It is very sickly sweet. ‘With blue-red juices, these they squander on my fingers’. ’Dumb as eyes’. The voice of the poem is again Sylvia Plath. And I think that this poem is as much about her personally as ‘Mirror’. The tone of this poem changes. In the first stanze it is over ripe and feverish but calm. In the second stanze however it becomes chaotic and frantic and I think that Plaths’ life is mirrored most in the second stanze. During it there is an uncertainty of whether or not she will see the sea, which I believe, is a metaphor for her natural death. In the final stanze the tone is definitely disappointment at there being nothing there. There is no rhyme scheme however there is some assonance such as eyes and sides.
During this poem nature is described in a more sinister way than in ‘mirror’. The images are not pleasurable and at some points sickening. It is a poem which makes full use of nature. In a very unpleasant way.
Overall an unpleasant poem but again I think that it works and is successful. The true meaning, as with many of Plaths poems can only be speculated about because only she will know the true meaning.
All of the poems, which we have just studied, were written in the 20th century by well-known Poets. The most accurate representations of nature come from Seamus Heaney, which is hardly surprising considering he grew up on a farm. Ted Hughes writes the most unrealistic, weird and at times frightening depictions of the natural world. The deepest and most meaningful poems to do with the natural world that we have studied come from Sylvia Plath who led a very intriguing and difficult life.
Nature is a very important part of poetry and although poetry is not as widespread as it used to be poems can still offer us an interesting in sight into how the world was when they were written and also the mentality and thoughts of the writer. There are few things, which can be described in such varied and interesting ways as nature.
By Payam Gammage
