Compare After The Deluge And Working Late

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Write a comparison between the two poems. Comment on the way the different poets use language styles to communicate their different ideas. At first glance, the poems After the Deluge by Wole Soyinka and Wedding in the flood by Taufiq Rafatare two very different poems. However, once the reader looks into the deeper meaning of each poem, certain ideas and elements can be identified in both. For example, the idea of water is a central theme in both poems, as one can guess from the title of each poem. However, while water is used as a metaphor in each poem, it has a very different meaning behind it for both, as it is used as a symbol of wealth and power in one, and disaster and misfortune in the other. In After the Deluge, water is used as a symbol of power as Soyinka tells the story of the man who could ‘fill his heart-shaped swimming pool with band notes’. However, he then loses everything when he played with the money he had that ‘it cracked the bullion market open wide’ so that he lost all his money and was dreamt of being in a village where water is scarce, to represent the poverty stricken place he is in now. The idea of excess water and scare water also gives structure to the poem, to create a story. When he is in the village, ‘a parched land’ where the water is very desired, ‘water is a God’. This ties in with the theme of irony and how power is self-destructive, as it is in fact his own fault that there is no water, as he was using it all to fill his swimming pool, among other things and it is his own fault that the village is in such poverty as he had spent all the money on ‘a chartered plane’ and feeding ‘a pound of caviar to his dog.’ In comparison, Wedding in the Flood symbolizes water as a disastrous element which brings about negative and misfortune. Similarly to After the Deluge,
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