Compare How the Poet Presents Love in 'the Manhunt' and 'Hour'

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The structure in ‘The Manhunt’ and in ‘Hour’ reflects the nature of the love that the two speakers share between their partners. For example in ‘The Manhunt’ the stanzas are broken down into two line stanzas. This represents that their love is disjointed like his body; we can also see that each stanza has been dedicated to a different part of his body. Each stanza is also very short which shows the small steps that she has to take to help heal him physically and mentally. We can tell that he is hurt psychologically as it says ‘unexploded mine buried deep in his mind’ and physically as it says ‘the rungs of his broken ribs’ these are both effects of his traumatic experience at war. The distribution of each stanza could also show the distance that she now has with the subject because of his lack of understanding of his painful experiences and emotions. As a reader, it sounds like she is writing the poem the way she would be saying it, this emphasises the shortness of each stanza and the small steps she has to take to his recovery, which is also shown in the tone of the poem as she sounds in pain, which makes the reader feel sorry for her. However, in ‘Hour’, the poem is separated into four stanzas, which all have four lines each apart from the last stanza which has two lines. Each stanza has emotive language of the writer’s feelings, we know this as it says things such as ‘we are millionaires, backhanding the night’ this gives the reader the impression that their relationship is stable and strong unlike the fragmented relationship in ‘The Manhunt’. From ‘Hour’ we can also see that it is written like a sonnet which shows that he is writing it like a love letter, however parts of the poem are spontaneous which tells us that their love is unpredictable which could indicate to the reader that they are at their honeymoon stage or that they’re just at the best part of
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