Comparative Essay- the Manhunt vs. Hour

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Comparative Essay- The Manhunt vs. Hour Simon Armitage’s, ‘The Manhunt’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Hour’ both use strong feelings to emphasize their core messages. While each author takes a different perspective on the nature of these feelings, in the end, both poems have an intense feeling of love at their core. Armitage’s ‘The Manhunt’ is about a soldier coming home from the war with various injuries. It is told from the point of view of the wife/girlfriend of the soldier. As she slowly helps him recover from his physical wounds, she realises that not only does this require great patience and sensitivity but that his most severe wounds might be in his mind. It is these wounds that she hopes to heal by the end of the poem. Only when she has “widened the search” for the source of his pain does she “come close” to helping him. Duffy’s ‘Hour’ is about a woman and her depth of emotion for the lover that she can only see for one hour. She goes through all the reasons why love is better than riches and provides true happiness even if the time you have is short. As she steals away her hour of lovers bliss, she tells the reader how she would choose each small moment with her lover over any amount of money or comfort. In the end, she concludes that “love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.” Each poem makes reference to love and danger, restriction, the physical body and sensation, and time. The depth of emotion around these topics is intense but handled very differently in each poem. In ‘Hour’, the love is passionate and sexual. The lovers are probably married to other people, or facing some other restriction and their meeting is dangerous. This danger makes it exciting. Her passion for her lover is seen when she says things like “for thousands of seconds we kissed”. There are strong feelings of urgency and sexuality. In “The Manhunt”, the love is deeper
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