Poems
Time
Language
Poetic Techniques
Portrayal of grief
Stop all the Clocks
(W.H. Auden)
.
The Voice
(Thomas Hardy)
.
Similarities
/Differences
Comparative Poetry S5A
Page 1
Stop All The Clocks
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W. H. Auden
Comparative Poetry S5A
The Voice by Thomas Hardy
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
Comparative Poetry S5A
Question: Compare and contrast Funeral Blues and The Voice. How does each poet
react to loss in their lives? You should focus carefully on the individual poet’s stage of
grieving, use of language, poetic technique, and the impact this loss has on their lives.
The Plan: remember PROOF READ each paragraph: This is designed to help you explore
each verse in each poem
1.
Explore how Auden presents his grief in the first verse of his poem. (Focus on
mood, use of imperatives and how they shape meaning)
2. Explore how Auden perceives that his grief affects everything (in verse two
through the use of personification)
3. In verse three Auden explains his total devotion to his lover explore how he does
this (sense of direction without which he is lost, note also how the possessive
pronoun ‘my’ is repeated, why?
4. Auden’s final verse is full of despair. The realisation of the magnitude of his loss
is finally articulated (Note again use of imperatives and the mood)
5. Explore how Hardy explores his grief at the death of his wife and what he
imagines and why.
6. In the second verse Hardy begins with a question, why? Also note he retreats in
to the past and the memory of her when they were first together why?
7. Hardy then explores the alternative to it being her ‘voice’. (Note the mood here
(if it is the breeze then she is dead, he is without hope and the whole verse is
one large question, again why?)
8. The final verse. Hardy moves on. Does he find hope in the season or not?. You all
assume that he does because he will die and the Christian idea is that thy will be
reunited again. Hardy never says that clearly. This final verse is ambiguous (we
are left uncertain as to whether he finds comfort or not). Explore both
arguments and decide which one you prefer
9. Compare and contrast:
a) The time between the death and the poet writing about it.
b) The individual poet’s use of language to express their feelings about loss.
(Use of imperatives versus interrogatives)
c) The poetic techniques each poet employs (uses) to express their loss
I. Rhythm (slow but why?)
II. Versification. Both poems are written in rhyming quatrains. This
allows each poet to give order to their feelings and to explore
their emotions. Hardy’s poem takes the shape of a question that
he explores and finally answers. Auden’s poem is the presentation
of his grief and his love. One is interrogative the other is
imperative.
III. Personification; (Aeroplanes and nature: again simple idea is that
all things are affected by poet’s feelings)
IV. Impact of loss. Look carefully at mood. (Is Auden’s grief more
emotional than Hardy’s? I would suggest you look carefully at the
final verse of each poem here.
Comparative Poetry S5A
An A-Z Of Poetic Terms (Nearly!!)
1. Alliteration: is when the same consonant is repeated in quick
succession. E.G. In The Voice ‘faltering forward’ the
consonant ‘f’ is repeated and if you say it mimics the
difficulty he has in moving on in his life.
2. Comparison: Putting two or more ‘things’ together and finding
similarities. You could for example compare verses in a poem
or between poems. Comparing the last verse of Funeral Blues
with The Voice might lead you to discuss how different they
are which brings us on to:
3. Contrast: Which is putting two or more things together and
finding things about them that are different. Again
contrasting the last verses of each poem would lead you to
discuss how different the poet’s reaction’s are to the death
of the person they loved. JUXTAPOSITION
4. Effect: How a particular poetic technique influences your
understanding or feeling about a poem. It is never advisable
to spot alliteration, without talking about the effect it has on
the poet’s message or your feelings about the poem.
5. Mood: (often referred to as atmosphere). The two are
interchangeable (you can use one or the other) Simply put this
is the feeling we get from reading a poem (or a story or play)
We need to look carefully at the writer’s use of language to
understand the mood or atmosphere of a piece of writing.
6. Onomatopoeia: A technique (method or writer’s trick) in which
words are chosen that recreate what they are describing. At
it’s simplest it a word like ‘buzz’ because it sounds like the
sound that bees make. Hardy uses onomatopoeia to recreate
the sound of breeze in its ‘listlessness’ (the sssssss help to
create that feeling. This device is often used to draw the
reader in to the poem to share the poet’s feelings or point of
view.
7. Personification: is when inanimate or non-human things or
objects are given human feelings. For example Auden
personifies grief in Stop All The Clocks’ as the ‘planes’ are
‘moaning overhead’. The effect of this is to suggest that his
grief affects all things.
Comparative Poetry S5A
8. Rhyme: Words that end with the same sound are said to
rhyme. This is not just the poet being clever. Poet’s can use
rhyme to link ideas together or to contrast them. As such it
can be a very simple but nevertheless very powerful poetic
technique.
9. Symbolism: everyday objects can be symbolic :In Funeral
Blues Auden uses many symbols because they are on one level
very simple but can also have a deeper significance. A simple
example would be ‘clocks’. Simply they are devices for telling
us the time however symbolically they could represent time,
the future, life (people talk about biological clocks for
example) The best way to spot symbolism might be to look at
a poem and consider whether the poet uses particular words
because they have powerful suggestions for us. Hardy
symbolises life and his eventual death using the idea of ‘leaves
falling’ because symbolically the season this happens in,
autumn, is a season of death. A poem set in spring might have
a very different message, one of hope, a celebration of life
because spring is a time that symbolises this.
10. Tense: So am I (see verbs)
11. Verbs: A word that expresses an action, or put incredibly
simply, a doing word. Verbs are important in determining the
tense of a poem) Poems written in the present tense ‘feel’ like
they are happening as we read them. This again helps to draw
us in, or become involved Both the poems we have studied are
written in the present tense. This is a device (think: a poet’s
trick) to make it seem like they are talking to us about how
they feel at a particular moment in time. Auden uses many
imperative verbs (commands) e.g. ‘stop’, ‘prevent’: These verbs
in their ‘imperative form’ (sorry, teacher speak) are crucial in
establishing Auden’s total despair at the loss of his lover.
Hardy uses verbs in the interrogative mode (verbs used to ask
questions) ‘Can’, for example is used to create a reflective,
thoughtful mood (because he is thinking about his wife and
asking himself questions)
12. Versification: (this sounds a lot worse than it actually is!) This
is the study of how verses in a poem link together, they can
be similar (comparative) or different (contrast) Comparing
the message in each verse can be very useful in understanding
how the mood develops or changes in a poem.
Comparative Poetry S5A
Comparative Poetry S5A