‘Marrysong’ by Dennis Scott

315 Words2 Pages
In line 3 to 6, the poet makes the reader feel hurt and anger on the first mood and the happiness of the second. Dennis Scott achieves this by comparing his wife’s constantly changing mood with ice cold water, the wall of anger, quarry of hurt and changing landscape. The poet writes “An hour he could be lost in the walled anger of her quarried hurt,” to show his confusion at the sudden change of emotion, trap by her emotion, and doesn’t know what happened or what to do. The use of the word “quarried” gives the reader an image of a deep, dark, mysterious mine. It makes the reader feel like the poet’s wife is hiding something from him,as if she has buried her hurt in the ground and is hoping no one finds it. In lines 7 and 8, the poet uses metaphor. He compares his wife’s constantly changing emotion with landscape. The poet also compares his understanding of his wife to a map. In this fourth sentence, the poet is saying that he is trying to draw a map of constant changing landscape, but every time he thinks he has completed the map, the landscape will start changing even further. The truth is, the poet is talking about his wife. Every time he thinks he understand her perfectly, her emotions and personality will change in the most unexpected way. The poet only uses four sentences, but he expresses everything he wanted to say in a way that is both complicated and deep. The last three lines of the poem shows that the poet is going to take in and get prepare to her changing emotion instead of trying to understand the reasons behind it. It also shows that the poet finally understands he can never understand and know his wife perfectly. There is always something new to learn and

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