Relationships in Nettles

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How do the poets show emotions in Nettles and one other poem? The poem I have chosen is Quickdraw by Carol Anne Duffy. Both poems portray different emotions, yet they seem to arise from a similar area: the effects of love. Both poets explore the feeling and emotion of love, shown by the Iambic pentameter rhythm in both poems, which is typical of a love poem as it falls to the beat of a heart, with 10 syllables in a sentence. However, instead of literally expressing themes of love, both poets seem to explore the effects of love, and the consequences it can have. Firstly, both poems express the emotion of pain, but in different ways, with Nettles looking at how our pain can also be shared by those we love, whereas Quickdraw looks at how love, sometime maybe unrequited or incomplete, can cause us pain. We can see this theme in Nettles through the semantic field of war, shown with Army vocabulary, including words such as ‘spears’, regiments’ and ‘recruits’, used to describe the ‘bed’ of nettles that cause pain to the persona’s child. This use of vocabulary enables the reader to associate the pain and destruction of war with the situation of the poem, taking the pain felt by the persona to the extreme and amplifying the effect it has on the persona. This enables it to have a much greater impact, and helps the poems transition into the consequences of this pain, such as the anger it causes. Another way that the poets expresses pain in Nettles is by juxtaposing the emotion with the action of soothing and comforting, which the parents do to the child when they are hurt, shown in the line ‘we soothed him till his pain was not so raw.’ The use of the ‘oo’ sound in ‘soothed’ elongates the sentence, giving a sense of calm, juxtaposed to the repetition of the plosive ‘b’ sound of ‘blisters beaded’ in the line before. This, again, amplifies the pain that the child
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