He uses “Kind old sun” which is personification of an old man who is wise and caring. The last hope for the soldier was the ‘sun’ but the sun wasn’t able to save him. The effect this has on the reader is that it links to the loss of life and also to the title ‘futility’ which means hopeless. Both poets question the idea of soldiers losing their lives because of war. The poems are effective as they made me realise that we have not even today learn this lesson about loss of life.
To what extent do you agree that “Passive Suffering” is the main theme to Owen’s poetry? Wilfred Owen’s poetry contains many war related themes. “Passive suffering” arguably being one of them. However the idea that it is a “main theme” to his poetry is certainly arguable due to the fact that there are so many other themes that run through all his poems, and that there is such variation in both setting and meaning with every poem that he has written. “The Show”, for example, dehumanises soldiers within the battlefield and arguably has no sense of “passive suffering” whatsoever.
Analyze the poem “ Mid Term Break” emphasizing how the poet has described death and grief in the poem. “Mid term break” was written by Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet who lived together with nine siblings. Many of his works are about everyday life, a testimony to his profound observations of even the smallest things. This poem, “Mid term break”, was a reflection of his brother, Christopher’s death. Although it is entitled “Mid Term Break”, the poem is far from cheerful.
“But I ain’t got neither bullet nor gun- and I’m too blue to look for one.” This poor man is so down in the dumps that he can’t even find the energy to get up and get a gun to take his life. With Langston having these same feelings he would have benefited from having someone to talk to, a friend, a relative, even a perfect stranger who was willing to listen and lend a helping hand. Langston wrote about his feelings in his poems but maybe if he had verbalized his feelings his poems may have been happier and more upbeat. After reading some of Langston Hughes poems you can see how his life is portrayed in his writings. He too was lonely and depressed.
The author explains when he was angry he told his anger not, which resulted in it to be feed negativity. In that make up of the first paragraph, the authors anger and wrath are the key characters of his poem. “And I watered it in fears; Night and morning with my tears. And I sunned it with smiles; And with soft deceitful wiles.” In these lines, Blake tells how tended to and nurtured his anger, how he made it grow. Although, he is examining a process, he isn’t suggesting a moral.
To some extent I agree that Auden’s poems are occupied with suffering as he manages to incorporate a constant idea of suffering whether it’s obvious or not in his poems. We start with Musee des Beaux Arts, this poem focuses around the story of Icarus. The idea of suffering that Auden presents is one that makes it seem as it is a matter of unimportance. “The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure” the fact that the ploughman didn’t even react to the suffering of Icarus nor anyone else shows that it is something that people cannot really sympathise with as they are not in the same situation. However this is human nature and Auden is merely showing from this poem that suffering is something that no person can understand until it happens to them and when they see someone else suffer it’s almost a relief to them that it isn’t happening to them.
Maybe suffering from depression or insecurities or just felt overwhelmed with life in general. Lines eleven and twelve read “I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.” I think this man had many internal struggles that he had a hard time dealing with and he didn’t know how to get help with them. Maybe he purposely swam out to far to see if the observers would help him? Maybe he unconsciously committed suicide to see if a friend would intervene. This man was metaphorically out of his depth.
However the result of this campus patronage was not entirely suited to the volatile nature of those poets so situated, as expressed by English writer Stephen Spender who considered the atmosphere in which Berryman worked (one of admiration and isolation) connected to his eventual suicide. [footnote] It could be said that Berryman was as much influenced as he was an influence upon the poets he met during this formative period. [footnote] Berryman killed himself in 1972 after a struggle with alcoholism and mental health issues and the undoubted effects of his father's suicide. The idea of death is present throughout Berryman's writing as a source of inspiration, identified in an interview for the Paris Review, "The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.
wninLike many of Smith's poems, "Not Waving but Drowning" is short, consisting of only twelve lines, divided into three stanzas. The narratives take place from a third-person perspective and describes the circumstances surrounding the "dead man" described in line one. The poem deals both metaphorically and literally with a man, lost in the sea, who is crying out and waving for help, but is misinterpreted as a friendly wave. When one gets past the swimming metaphor of the poem, they'll find that the man has found himself in isolation, but seems to hide his true feelings. No one hears his cries for help or recognizes his struggle.
The boy relates his feelings to death and how he feels lost, even though he is not dying. The feeling of heartbreak for the first time can feel as though it is the end of the world, and this is how the young couple are feeling. They have extremely different points of view than the speaker. The speaker in the poem is an old man who does not understand why the young couple are mourning over their relationship. He also wishes he were younger and relates his thoughts about death to the actual meaning, not relationships.