Depiction of Death and Loss in the Poems 'Hitcher' and 'Conscientious Objector'

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In this essay I will be comparing two poems, 'Hitcher' by Simon Armitage and 'Conscientious Objector' by Edna St. Vincent Millay, on how they explore death and loss. 'Hitcher' is a poem about a man who picks up a hitch-hiker and either kills/badly injures him whilst driving the car and the death/injury has no effect on him what so ever. 'Conscientious Objector' is a very strong meaningful poem showing someone/something standing up to death, a conscientious objector is someone who is against war, violence and the military, the speaker in this poem is a conscientious objector. The subjects of both of these poems are the same; death and loss however they portray death and loss as very different things, in the 'conscientious objector' death is personified who has many duties to carry out. In 'hitcher' death is something that has happened, like we would normally think what death is. The movement of both of the poems is very different, in the 'conscientious objector' death is introduced, and throughout the poem the speaker of the poem (a stable-boy perhaps) is saying all the things he does and how he refuses to help 'death', this shows that he could be a conscientious objector. In 'hitcher' death is very different, the poem starts of quite normally as a fairly normal day, until in stanza 3 where the poem has a complete change of movement and feeling as we read that driver kills the hitch-hiker and then continues his day as usual. The main and most important piece of imagery in the 'conscientious objector' in exploring death/loss is that death is personified as a person “I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death” “I him him leading...” we know that death is a person because the 'd' in death has been capitalised so it must be a name. Also the image that death is riding a horse “I hear him leading his horse out of the stall” this relates to the bible
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