The poem is written in three stanzas of nine lines. There does not seem to be any other regular patterns in the structure. The lines are all very different lengths and there are no rhyming patterns. This may be to help darken the atmosphere as rhyming can make poems less serious sometimes. Many metaphors like “phantom laundry” are used. That metaphor is for the wind and is used to a sort of supernatural effect to go along with the dark tone of the poem. The whole poem is rich in imagery. An example is in line 15 where it says, “so ripe it is a bush of flies”. This image as like the rest of the poem is quite a nasty idea and it helps give the poem its grim atmosphere.
In general the poem has a very dark atmosphere that could be thought of as similar to hell. Plath has managed to take a perfectly normal and innocent subject and turn it into a dark and evil idea. This may possibly portray her personal problems at the time when she wrote it.
I will now write about “Pike” by Ted Hughes (born 1930).
The poem in general describes the pike species of fish. The fish are described as “Killers from the egg” and a sense of the fish being deadly predators comes off from the poem. Line 13, “The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs” makes the pike sound like a nasty dangerous beast and puts over a slightly exaggerated image of the danger of the fish. Line 7, “submarine delicacy and horror” also does this, as horror is a horrible word that would not normally be associated with fish. The pike are also put over as grand and beautiful as if they are the rulers of the underwater and great impressive animals. An example of this is in line 5, “Or move, stunned by their own grandeur”. The poem has a slightly strange and abnormal effect to it sometimes, for example when Hughes talks about the fish having pectorals which one would not normally think about on a fish.
Towards the end of the poem Hughes writes about going fishing in a deep lake with very large pike in it. He fishes by night and an atmosphere of fear and menace is created. Hughes seems to be slightly scared of the fish because he thinks they are such majestic animals. This atmosphere is created by lines like “Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed, That rose slowly towards me, watching”.
The structure of the poem is quite basic as it is made up of eleven stanzas of four lines each. Every line is quite short but there is no rhyming which is odd for a poem of that shape. The poem is also quite strange in the way that some sentences begin at the end of one stanza and finish at the beginning of the next. There is also no rhythm or metre to the poem. All the lines are different from each other in this sense. This all adds to the slightly abnormal effect that the poem gives. There is a run of imagery throughout the whole poem of the fish being like menacing beasts. The imagery is subtle but also shows in some parts what the fish is like to everything in it’s own underwater world, for example, “A hundred feet long in their world”.
The poem is about fish but throughout it Hughes generally makes the fish sound unpleasant and dangerous. The poem can be compared to “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath as they are both about nature. They are similar in the sense that they both take what would be thought of as an innocent subject of nature and distort it to make it horrible or even evil. They were married and Plath committed suicide so these poems may reflect the situation they were in at the time.
The next poem I will look at is “Harvest Moon” also by Ted Hughes (born 1930).
This poem is mainly describing the moon at harvest time. It talks about what it looks like and how it behaves. It also remarks about the effect the moon has on certain things such as people, farm animals and the harvest.
The first thing that one notices about the poem is how unreal and peculiar it is. The descriptions of the moon are very odd. For example, on the first line it says the moon is “flame-red”. One would imagine the moon to be a bright grey normally which is very different from what Hughes writes. He also describes how the moon “Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing”. This suggests that the moon moves quickly when in fact it moves so slowly across the sky that one cannot see it move. The idea of the moon bouncing along the hills is weird as well. It creates the image of a child’s ball being played with rather than the moon. The moon is described as “A vast balloon”. It is strange how Hughes did not say that it is like a vast balloon but said that it is one. Another odd phrase is in line 4 where is says that the moon “sinks upward”. That contradicts itself. One more example of weird use of words is in line 5 where the moon is compared to a “gold doubloon”. It describes the moon as being gold rather than grey and a doubloon is a Spanish coin which is a peculiar comparison. All these things that are in the poem give it a very unreal and abnormal effect which is quite interesting and different from most poems.
There are other strange lines in the poem that are not describing the moon but are about what effect the moon has on other things. For example, lines 13 and 14 say, “And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep stare up at her petrified, while she swells”. This makes the moon sound very imposing and majestic which is an unusual idea. In line 18 the wheat fields speak and say “We are ripe, reap us!”. Fields of wheat speaking is a bizarre concept and adds well to the peculiarity of the poem.
The poem is made up of five stanzas. The first has five lines, the second has three, the third and fourth have four and the fifth has three lines. There is some rhyming but it is not the same throughout the poem. In the first stanza the first line rhymes with the second and fifth. In the second stanza it is the first and third lines. In the third stanza it is the first and second and there is no other rhyming in the rest of the poem. There is no rhythm or metre. This is all a very peculiar structure and it adds to the effect the poem is giving.
The poem can be compared to Hughes’ other poem “Pike” and also Plath’s “Blackberrying” in the sense that it takes a normal subject of nature and exaggerates it or makes it weird.
The next poem I will analyse will be “I Shall Return” by Claude McKay (1891-1948).
This poem in general is about McKay’s love of his home country Jamaica which he did not live in at the time. It is about him wanting to go back to the native life there and gives reasons for his wanting to return. They are mostly about the beauty of the nature there. For example in lines 7 and 8 it says “And to realise once more my thousand dreams, Of waters rushing down the mountain passes”. It is like he is remembering what life was like when he used to live there. The writing is very emotional and it puts over that he loves his country very much. He mentions the title “I Shall Return” many times within the poem. This puts a big emphasis on how much he loves Jamaica and wants to go back there. He uses nature to express his love which is obviously a very different use to how Plath and Hughes used it.
Many colours are used in McKay’s descriptions of the place such as “golden”, “blue-black”, “sapphire” and “brown”. This is showing how beautiful and interesting the country looks. There are some uses of alliteration in the poem as well. Some examples are “sapphire skies”, “brown blades” and “dear delicious tunes”. These help the poem flow better and when reading the poem make the descriptions sound big and wonderful and generally more emotional. Many of the descriptions seem nice because they appeal to the senses. When reading the poem one can imagine smells of the “forest fires” and sounds “Of waters rushing down the mountain passes”. The rest of the poem is made up of majestic sights. This makes the reader imagine better what the country is like so McKay has succeeded in describing the country in the best way possible.
The poem is just one stanza of fourteen lines and so is a sonnet. The rhyming scheme is alternate lines e.g. 1 and 3, although the last two lines both rhyme with each other. The last two lines are also the concluding lines and are very important. The title is repeated twice just in these lines which again puts a big emphasis on the fact that he wants to return. He also says, “I shall return again To ease my mind of long, long years of pain”. This is showing that life for him was much worse where he lived in America because of racism. The poem shows that this is the main reason for him wanting to return.
The last poem I will look at is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (1874-1963).
This poem is about the poet going out walking and who then comes to a fork and has to make a decision of which road to take. There is a large element of ambiguity in the sense that the whole poem is has a double meaning. It is a metaphor for making decisions in general. It uses nature in a big way to create this metaphor. Frost is showing how hard it can be to make decisions and also how he goes about making them. At the fork in the poem Frost chooses to go down the road that looks least used. This may be a metaphor to show how he makes decisions. He takes the least obvious choice. His personality is coming through in the poem. He might have been somebody who likes risks and excitement.
In the first line Frost describes the wood as “yellow”. This seems a strange choice for an adjective. Many other more normal two-syllable words could have been used instead. The way he has used it gives the poem a sort of unreal effect which suggests that the poem is just a metaphor and didn’t really happen. This idea is also suggested by the odd rhyming scheme. There are four stanzas of five lines each and the rhyming scheme is the first and third line, the second and fifth and the third and fourth.
The poem does not actually say whether the choice of road was a good choice but instead leaves it to the reader by ending the poem with “I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference”. It does not say whether travelling the less used road has made a good or bad difference. Frost is being ambiguous again and has left the answer unclear. This makes the readers think themselves about how to make their own decisions and that seems to be the message in the poem.
The language is quite simple and there is no imagery or anything like that. The poem is just a metaphor for making decisions. The poem uses nature in a completely different way to the other poems. Frost is trying to put over a point and has chosen a metaphor to do with nature to accomplish this.
All of the poems I have written about are about nature or use nature in different ways to put over a point. “Blackberrying”, “Pike” and “Harvest Moon” are all about things in nature or the environment but are written in certain ways which change the subject and make it more fictional and made up. “I Shall Return” is about the poet’s love for his country and nature is one of the things that he loves about his country so the poem is mainly about nature. “The Road Not Taken” is purely a metaphor to put forth a point. The poet has chosen nature however to create the metaphor.
This study has shown that nature was used in a very wide variety of ways in poetry from the earlier part of the 20th century.
