All the poems you have read are preoccupied with violence and/or death. Compare the ways in which the poets explore this preoccupation. What motivations or emotions do the poets suggest lie behind the preoccupation? You must analyse at least six poems, ensuring you include at least one pre-1914 poem. In this essay I will compare and contrast a collection of different poems by Carol Anne Duffy, Robert Browning, Ben Johnson and Simon Armitage. I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one. Despite the differences between the characters in the poems, I will also go on to say how the preoccupation with death and violence all seem to stem from the apparently unstable minds of the characters; from the instability brought on by varying emotions such as grief, jealousy, resentment, guilt and madness, and the fact that these emotions may lead to paranoia. ‘Havisham’ is a poem about a woman (based on the character from Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ of the same name) who lives alone, often confining herself to one room and wallowing in self-pity because she was apparently jilted at the alter by her scheming fiancé. ‘Havisham’ has been unable to move on from this trauma and is trapped in the past. Her isolation has caused her to become slightly mad. She feel... ... middle of paper ... ...t days in a persons life though for Havisham because she was jilted at the alter, the only memories she has of her wedding day is of her violence and aggressiveness and when she ‘stabbed at the wedding cake’, normally a newlywed husband and wife cut and eat the wedding cake together whereas Havisham’s trauma has led to her actually stabbing at her own wedding cake because of the hatred she cannot handle. Likewise in ‘Salome’ Duffy uses visual imagery such as ‘his head on a platter’ and also uses colour imagery ‘the reddish beard’ red is associated with blood. She also uses aural imagery; ‘Never again! I needed to clean up my act, Get fitter Cut out the booze and the fags and the sex. Yes and for the latter, It was time to turf out the blighter, The beater or biter, Who’d come like a lamb to the slaughter To Salome’s bed’ Though in ‘The Laboratory’
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Oxymoronic phrases are used throughout the poem “Havisham” such as “Beloved Sweetheart Bastard” and “Love’s/hate” to express the ambivalence that this woman ...
Miss Havisham has a Victorian woman's version of great expectations; she is about to become the epitome of the "angel in the house," a wealthy wife of high societal status, when her dreams...
At the beginning of the story, Miss Havisham values her pride and takes painful lengths to maintain her security by inflicting pain on others. She is also unforgiving and holds a grudge that she vows to keep until she dies. Both these characteristics prevent her from the help and love she needed in able to move on. However, when she finds remorse through seeing a vision of her wrongs through Pip’s agony, she is able to grow. From her maturity to seeing the wrong in her actions, Miss Havisham is able to overcome her pride and unforgiving personality, thus, allowing her to move on and find self-growth as a person. The lesson learned from Miss Havisham’s growth is that allowing trivial things to disrupt the bigger picture can be hazardous to one’s life. Thus, one must take actions to achieve acceptance and self-growth in order to see the bigger
A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton. This is but one of Webster 's definitions of a poem. Using this definition of “poem,” this paper will compare and contrast three different poems written by three different poets; William Shakespeare 's Sonnets 116, George Herbert’s Easter Wings and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt.
Subsequently, the language in the poem reflects that of military use: “reinforcements” and “disrupting blockade” represent conflict and furthermore, colourful and textural imagery evokes within the reader a deeper understanding of the destructive nature of war; “crimped petals”, “yellow bias” and “spasms of paper red” support the colourful imagery used by the poet. The metaphors used by the speaker, moreover, show how the mother cannot escape from an awareness of her son’s violent death: “spasms” and “bandaged” suggest that the son’s death was exceedingly heartless and brutal. The speaker’s memories enable her to maintain a connection with her son but she is unable to avoid think of injury and death. The use of colours and texture ...
Pip meets Miss Havisham as she was on her wedding day when she was jilted by Compeyson, still wearing the dress she would have been married in. “I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.” Pip describes how much time has passed and the psychical and mental implications of Miss Havisham’s vengeful nature. “I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone.” Yet as the novel progresses, she becomes more pitiable than vengeful, as her plan to wreck the man who betrayed her explodes in her face as twists the novel’s moral perspective.
Miss Havisham “was dressed in rich material- satins, and lace, and silks,” which “had been white long ago, and had lost [its] luster, and [is] faded and yellow” (57,58). Miss Havisham’s “once white dress, all yellow and withered” drapes over her “ghastly waxwork” of “yellow skin and bone” (89,58,86). She is “a skeleton in the ashes of” “the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, [which] look like earthy paper” (58,60). Miss Havisham’s bridal dress swallows her withered figure, and she “[has] no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes” (58). In agreement with Bert Hornbeck, a world class literary critic, the “white at first represented innocence and purity” just as a white wedding dress should, but the transition of the dress from white to yellow alludes to the “decay of innocence and purity” (216). Withered and worn like her clothes, Miss Havisham is burying herself alive by stopping time and hiding away in her house. Her yellow and tarnished bridal dress is like her burial outfit, her veil is like the shroud, and her house is like the dark casket. She has frozen time and is no longer living in her stagnant state. In her place of stagnation, she is eaten alive by the pain inflicted upon her by a man just as the mice have gnawed on the house and gnawed at her (Dickens 89). As portrayed through her
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.
Ellmann, Richard and O'Clair, Robert, ed. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies of the Structure of Poetry. London: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
In contrast with the sinister implications about death of the previous poem, Because I coul...
This reflects the speakers’ stance that as he has accepted death, he expects others to accept his death, and wishes for them not to mourn him. The rhythmic beat provided by the caesuras adds on to the continuous uniform rhyme scheme that forms the poem into a unified whole. The simplicity of the rhyme scheme which is found in both poems, which creates the steady rhythm of the poem, contributes to the creation of a calm atmosphere, a certain calm in the face of death. While Shakespeare’s speaker seems more emotional, and Yeats’s more explanatory in tone, they both express a readiness to greet death. However different in style and context, both poems serve the same purpose for their speakers, an acceptance of death, Yeats’s acceptance of death as a consequence of war and Shakespeare’s acceptance of death as a result of unrequited love.
Miss Havisham, perpetually unhappy, is a woman who is stuck in the past. She once had a sense of who she was, but after being abandoned by her fiancé, she can’t move on. From that moment forward, she is only seen in ““a long white veil” and a “splendid” wedding dress, with “but one shoe on” (Dickens, 143). Havisham lives in a blend of fantasy and reality, in both the past and the present. Her inability to move on interferes with her identity because the world around her changes continually while she makes an effort to stay the same. She no longer knows who she is, and the resulting emotional trauma hinders her ability to empathize. Her lack of empathy negatively affects how she interacts with people, especially Estella. Miss Havisham believes she is God, and uses her influence to breed Estella into a numb, unfeeling heartbreak machine. Miss Havisham’s self-proclaimed purpose is to make Estella “break [men’s] hearts and have no mercy”, in an enraged revenge plot to get back at the universe for her misfortune (Dickens, 238). Miss Havisham lives in a world far from reality, and cannot accept who she is or the circumstances that she finds herself in. As a result, she is heinous, vengeful, and malicious in every action she perfor...
Rundle, Thomas J. Collins & Vivenne J. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry ad Poetic Theory. Concise. Toronto: Broadview Press Limited, 2005.