Thl8234 Essay

2235 Words9 Pages
Ted Hughes’ poem, Sketching a Thatcher is a densely metaphorical text, loaded with figurative language. Its meaning is therefore often not immediately accessible and requires a deeper look from a reader in order to decipher the text. A more thorough analysis of the metaphoric constructions allows us to unlock its meaning and understand the essence of the ‘sketch’ that Hughes presents with this poem, enriching his portrait of an aged roof-thatcher and imbuing it with the quintessentially sketch-like quality that the title of the poem suggests. Deconstructing the imagery in terms of arguments, focal expressions and the tenor-vehicle constructions of the figurative language scattered through the text and evaluating the relationships between local and global metaphors of the poem allows a reader to connect the images into a coherent and more accessible pattern. In this essay, we will analyse a few of the local metaphors that form part of the central tenets of the poem and look at the ways in which they interact with each other as part of the global metaphor of the poem. In this way, we can clearly plot the role of figurative language in the text and understand how it is used to convey meaning in the poem itself. Before getting into the individual local metaphors and their analysis, it would be prudent to understand some of the terms through which the language will be analysed. First of all, language is understood to be figurative when there is a certain violation of selectional restrictions within a sentence or a phrase. A phrase can only be a metaphor when it cannot be taken literally, or when its literal implication would be physically impossible. To say a man is tall is not physically impossible, and therefore not figurative, but to say a man is a mountain is very much figurative, since no man can be a mountain in any way, shape or form. The selectional
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