The writer does something very clever in the poem to do with who holds the power. He makes it seem like Matthew himself has no power himself in the poem. This may come across very strange as he is the murder but really the power he holds in the attack, is all in the razor. The writer gives the razor a life of its own, giving the impression that Matthew is not doing anything wrong; it is the razor doing the crime. He does this in the line ‘Where all around the razor, had written its red name’.
In ‘The Laboratory’ the murderer has no feelings of love towards her victims. I say victims because not only is the victim the one about to be murdered but also the king, as she wants to see him upset and suffering by watching his loved one die. I think in this poem the murder is all down to her wanting the power by being with the king. If she is the kings wife she sees herself as been rich and wealthy with a lot of respect and power. Also the feelings of hatred felt by the murderer may have been provoked by the lack of respect shown to her by the king and his lover. They think she is crying in a church and praying for them, so instead thinks she will prove them wrong by doing something else, something they won’t be expecting. The power in this poem is mainly in the murderer as she is the one with the weapon, and unlike in the other poem does not feel one bit sorry for her victim.
The murders in these poems are very different in their method. In ‘The Charlotte Dymond’ poem, Matthew slits her throat with a razor and then crushes her chest with a rock. I would imagine that this sort of a murder would have been very quick but while in lasted, very painful indeed. The action of crushing her chest gives me the impression that Matthew was trying to crush her heart, cause he felt she had crushed his. This sort of a murder was put across by the poet as a violent and bloody murder. He creates this image by using the words flood and blood together. It is like you can see her drowning in her own puddle of blood. This technique is called assonance. In ‘The Laboratory’ the murderer is scheming to find a really horrible way of murdering her rival, and so uses poison. This death would have been fairly slow and painful as the poison would brand and burn the victim. She likes the idea of poison because it will leave no evidence that it was her, she is amazed how death can be carried in something so small as a drop on earring and it will give the king a chance to see the victim distraught, ugly and in lots of pain.
The poets use certain phrases to create the image of a very secretive and magical death. He does this by using words like smoke, which all of a sudden makes you think of wizards and magical things. The writer also gives the impression of lots of potions and mixtures bubbling away in the background. This setting very much matches the sort of murder that was about to take place as the king and his lover thinks she is at the church crying, but instead very secretively planning a murder. It is also secretive because no one would have found out it was her that committed the murder because it would have left no evidence.
The killer’s motives are different in each poem. In the ‘Charlotte Dymond’ poem Matthews motive to him is to cleanse her of her sin and make her pure again. He is confused and believes he is doing a good deed. His killing is also linked to possessiveness. He may have had the idea that if he can’t have her no one else can. He very much loved Charlotte, and I can tell this in the way he describes her, ‘Her skin was soft as sable, her eyes were wide as day, her hair was blacker than the bog that licked her life away’. This makes him think that, she is so beautiful and so perfect that it is not right to have a sin hanging over someone as pure as Charlotte.
In ‘the laboratory’ the murderer doesn’t care about the effect the murder will have on anybody else. She is more bothered what will happen to her if the plan backfires, as it says in the poem ‘if it hurts her, beside can it ever hurt me?’ Her motive for the murder is for power. As I mentioned earlier, she believes that if she can become the king’s lover lots of riches will become hers. The murder is also an act of jealously.
The personality of the killer in this poem is very scheming, cold, because she feels no guilt for what she is doing, and neurotic. My reasons for believing this come from the way she expresses herself in the poem, she is very excited about the murder and is very self-centred.
The victims in this poem are also different in their behaviour. Charlotte is put across in the poem as a girl with lots of pride and beauty, yet after reading the poem seems like she isn’t as innocent as she looks. She is powerful to control Matthew’s feelings and actions, but in the attack she is powerless against the razor. She was very naïve too. In the poem as she had no idea what Matthew knew or felt and certainly she didn’t fear him in the slightest or feel unsafe when around him. This is also true in the other poem. The victims were also naïve and didn’t know how the murderer was going to react when told the king didn’t love her.
In ‘The Laboratory’ the poet doesn’t tell you a lot about the victim. The whole poem is spoken by the murderer so I can’t really judge the victim. Given the poem the killer seems a bit out of a head case so I can’t really trust what she says about the victim. As always there is two sides to a story. But from what has been said she seems almost like a bully. Laughing at someone else’s loss. The murderer describes her as very masculine looking, ‘She’s not little, no minion like me!…………..those masculine eyes – say no!’
After reading the poems both by male writers it gives me a very deceitful impression of women at that time. Especially in ‘The Laboratory’ it comes across to me that women are very scheming and untrustworthy. Not only was the victim in this poem very flirtatious but also the murderer, where as in ‘The Charlotte Dymond’ poem it was only the victim that had betrayed someone’s trust. The one similarity about the way females are put across in both poems is that both seem very proud. In the ‘Charlotte Dymond’ poem Charlotte stayed proud all the time. Not affected by the thought she was seeing two men she walked in pride through the moors. I can tell she still had pride because it says of how she was dressed. In ‘The Laboratory’ the female killer still had pride. She was proud in the way she dressed too and also she was proud of what she was doing. At the very end it says how she brushes the dust off herself and prepares herself for the attack.
In ‘The Laboratory’ my sympathies go out to none of them. I think the victim is just as bad as the murderer by laughing at the killer when she was upset. This all of a sudden makes me think of her as very rude and unthoughtful character. But this gives no means for the killer to do what she did. She could have got some revenge some other way, mentally and not physically.
In the ‘Charlotte Dymond’ poem I sympathise strangely enough with Matthew. This is why I prefer this poem. It is very clever on the mind. I mean what has Mathew done wrong? After studying the poem I convinced myself that the razor was the murderer its-self. Charlotte committed a crime as well and we cannot forget that. Matthew obviously was very confused, upset and wanted to make it all go away and be like it was before. He got punished as well which he did not mind because he accepted after what he did was wrong, but at the time thought he was doing Charlotte a favour. All in all this was a double tragedy.
Both poems I studied were both interesting in the way the writers played games with your minds. Although I preferred the ‘Charlotte Dymond’ poem I also thought ‘The Laboratory’ was a very clever and well-structured poem. In both poems at some point made me question what was right and wrong to believe.
By Sally Foster
9BAC
