October - Gillian Clarke

The first stanza of Gillian Clarke's poem 'October' sets an autumnal atmosphere for the poem. The metaphor of 'a dead arm' in line 2 for a branch of a tree that has broken forewarns us of the theme of the poem. Yet there is contrast here too, as the decay is seen against the 'bright' poplar trees whose leaves 'tremble gradually to gold'. Alliteration is skilfully used here as well as in the 'broken branch' and then again in line 4 as a 'sharp shower' turns the face of a stone lion a darker shade. This gloom is underlined at the end of the stanza where the lobelia, seen as the lion's 'dreadlocks', is changing from blue to brown as it dies. The imagery here is rich and describes both the beauty and decay of the season.

At the start of the second stanza, Clarke confronts us with the blunt phrase 'My friend dead', leaving us in no doubt as to the central focus of 'October'. The setting is the graveyard, where alliteration appears again as the coffin is carried to the 'hawthorn hedge'. Clarke portrays her lost friend as being but a slight burden in her coffin: 'lighter / than hare-bones on men's shoulders'. The mourners have 'stony' faces, echoing the statue of the lion from the first stanza. Rain mingles with tears, as there is 'weeping in the air'; there is a softer feel here than the 'sharp shower' stanza 1. Clarke describes the grave with the simile 'deep as a well', perhaps feeling that her friend will be separated from her by a considerable gulf. 'Thud' describes the heavy fall of the earth into the grave, while in contrast the alliterative 'fall of flowers' is a slow one, emphasising their lightness.

The final line of the second stanza consists merely of the phrase 'fall of flowers', and the opening line of the third and final stanza is indented to appear as a continuation of the preceding line, thus forming a stronger link between the second and third stanzas. This final stanza has a tremendous feeling of speed and urgency that is in sharp contrast to the initial part of the poem. Clarke's reaction to her friend's death is that of feeling a need to accomplish as much as possible before the time of her own death. In lines 12 to 13 of the poem she describes how 'the pen / runs faster than wind's white steps over grass'. Her pen is personified, and again alliteration creates a vivid image in 'wind's white steps'. The statement in line 14 'For a while health feels like pain' gives the impression that her grief for her friend was hard to bear at first. This feeling, however, was followed by 'panic', and the pace of the stanza increases again with phrases such as 'running the fields' and 'the racing leaves'. Clarke is desperate to capture the fleeting images of nature: 'holding that robin's eye / in the laurel'. Comparison with the speed of the wind is made once again in the simile of line 18: 'I must write like the wind'. Clarke ends her poem with a sense that she can win the struggle against time and the moment of her death as she continues writing, 'winning ground'.

'October' is a compact poem that gathers pace as it moves forward, beginning with leaves 'gradually' turning gold and ending with the need to 'write like the wind'. Out of the decay of the season of autumn and the sadness at the death of a friend comes motivation and the urgency to write faster and put the transient images of the changing seasons into words before time runs out. Language is used here to create powerful imagery with alliteration, metaphor, simile and contrast all playing a part. 'October' is a skilfully constructed poem that imparts a sense of using every available moment of life to the full.

Anne Hathaway - Carol Ann Duffy

n her poem entitled 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy adopts the persona of Shakespeare's widow. The introductory quote from Shakespeare's will 'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed' reminds us that Shakespeare's best bed was reserved for guests, and that Anne inherited the one that she and her husband slept in. This bed becomes the focus of the fourteen-line poem.

In the opening two lines, Duffy uses a metaphor to express the magic of the bed in which Shakespeare made love to Anne: it was 'a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas'. More metaphors follow in lines three and four as Anne Hathaway recalls their lovemaking; she expresses the notion that Shakespeare would 'dive for pearls', and she describes the sweet words he said to her as 'shooting stars' that landed on her lips when he kissed her.

From line five to line ten Duffy uses imagery in a fascinating way that relates directly to the fact that Shakespeare was a writer. Anne sees her body as 'a softer rhyme to his ... now assonance', assonance being a figure of speech in which the same vowel sound is repeated. Then follows the charming personification of his touch, portrayed as 'a verb dancing in the centre of a noun', giving a feeling of grace and delicacy. Anne says that she sometimes dreamed that Shakespeare had 'written' her, wishing that she herself were part of his artistic creation. She metaphorically imagines the bed as 'a page beneath his writer's hands'. She sees their lovemaking as drama enacted through 'touch', 'scent' and 'taste'.

In lines eleven and twelve a contrast is created to the early magic of the poem in the description of how the guests, in the best bed, 'dozed on, / dribbling their prose'; no poetic lovemaking for them! But line twelve then switches to Anne's alliterative description of Shakespeare as 'My living laughing love'. She tells us in line thirteen how she treasures her memories of him with the metaphor 'I hold him in .the casket of my widow's head'. The final line compares this act to the way in which Shakespeare held Anne so lovingly in that second-best bed. The last two lines are a rhyming couplet, just as the last two lines of a Shakesperian sonnet would be, ending the poem with a sense of unity.

Duffy's 'Anne Hathaway' is a poem full of rich imagery, the tale of a woman who remembers her husband in a wonderful, loving way with no hint of sorrow. It is beautiful to read and to dwell on the magical pictures that are painted within it.

Song of the Old Mother - W. B. Yeats

In his brief and compact ten-line poem, 'Song of the Old Mother', Yeats takes on the persona of an elderly woman who contrasts her harsh, unrelenting daily routine with that of carefree young people.

In the first four lines, the old mother tells us that she has to get up at sunrise and work until it gets dark. The word 'and' is used seven times in these initial four lines, emphasising the fact that the woman has a string of household chores to carry out, one after the other. The fact that she says 'I must scrub and bake and sweep' gives the impression that she has no choice in the matter, and probably does not enjoy these endless chores. In the fourth line the stars are personified: they 'blink and peep', perhaps to give the old woman a hint that her day's work is finally over.

Over the course of the next four lines, the old mother comments on the life of the young people around her, which is in stark contrast to her own. They have no work to do, but spend their lives in 'idleness'. They don't have to get up early like she does, staying in bed as long as they wish. All they have to worry about is whether the ribbons for their hair and their clothes match each other. It bothers these young girls if the wind merely blows a lock of hair (tress) out of place.

In the final two lines of the poem, the old mother returns to thoughts of how she has to spend her days: she repeats the word 'must', again leaving us in no doubt that her work is forced upon her. The very last line repeats the phrase 'seed of the fire' from line two, but here it appears to be used metaphorically. The fire is said to be growing weak and cold, but this in fact symbolises what is happening to the woman as her life nears its end.

There is no outpouring of emotion here, yet we can sense that the old mother feels a degree of injustice. Her own life is so hard whilst that of the young women, who surely have more energy than her, is so carefree.

Yeats uses rhyming couplets in this poem, which has a strong, regular rhythm. The repetitive routine of the old mother's day-to-day life is reflected in the regularity of the poem's rhyme and rhythm. It is a straightforward poem whose message, in the first person, comes over clearly with the use of contrast between the life of an old woman and that of the young girls she sees around her.

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow

Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;

And then I must scrub and bake and sweep

Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;

And the young lie long and dream in their bed

Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,

And their day goes over in idleness,

And they sigh if the wind lift but a tress:

While I must work because I am old,

And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

William Butler Yeats

1899

Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney

Heaney's poem 'Death of a Naturalist' focuses on his experience of collecting and watching frogspawn as a child, and his reaction when the spawn turned into frogs.

In the first ten lines of the poem Heaney uses vivid imagery to describe the setting and its sights, smell and sounds. The phrase 'flax-dam festered' in the opening line combines assonance and alliteration, and begins to create the atmosphere of decay. 'Heavy headed' at the end of the second line again uses assonance and alliteration in one phrase to describe the flax that had rotted. The heaviness is emphasised further in the third line, where the flax is 'weighted down by huge sods'. The idea that hot weather has caused the decay is expressed in line four: 'Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun', a personification of the oppressiveness of the sun. A gentler image focusing on sound is created in 'Bubbles gargled delicately' in line five. The movement of flies is described with a metaphor: 'bluebottles / wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell', a fascinating image combining different senses. Line seven hints at the beauty of the scene with its 'dragonflies, spotted butterflies'.

In line eight Heaney makes the first mention of frogspawn with the metaphor 'warm thick slobber', which as a child was 'best of all' to him among the offerings of nature. In line nine he uses the simile 'grew like clotted water' to describe his impression of it. The poem then switches to an account of how Heaney collected frog spawn every spring, filling 'jampotfuls of the jellied / specks', imagery that again combines alliteration and assonance. The jars were arranged both at home and at school, then carefully observed as the specks turned into 'nimble-/swimming tadpoles' – another example of assonance.

Lines fifteen to twenty-one (the end of the first stanza) are a very childlike account of how the schoolteacher, Miss Walls, taught Heaney's class about frogs and frogspawn. Simple, childish language features in this section, such as 'the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs'; there are four clauses each joined by 'and' in this sentence, just as though it were written by a child. The final sentence of the first stanza continues in the same style, telling us that frogs are yellow in sunny weather but 'brown / In rain'. The last, brief two-word line of the first stanza seems to underline the fact that this is the end of a period of innocence and that a change is forthcoming.

The second stanza of twelve lines is much shorter than the first and has a very different tone; the feeling of change is signalled by the opening phrase 'Then one hot day'... Unpleasant imagery begins with fields described as 'rank / with cowdung'. At the end of line two and the beginning of line three the frogs are seen as 'angry' and have 'invaded the flax-dam': they have taken over in a war-like gesture. As Heaney approached he heard a 'coarse croaking' that was a new sound in that setting; in line twenty-six he uses the metaphor 'The air was thick with a bass chorus' to describe how the sound filled the place. Frogs are everywhere and they are ugly, 'gross-bellied', pictured with assonance in the phrase 'cocked / on sods'. Their flabby necks are described by Heaney with the simile 'pulsed like sails'. The sound of their movements is expressed by onomatopoeia: 'slap and plop', which obviously disgusted Heaney who felt that these were 'obscene threats'. In line thirty their stance is described by the simile 'Poised like mud grenades', an image that echoes the war-like connotation of the word 'invaded' in line twenty-four. Heaney again voices his distaste for the sound of the frogs in the phrase 'their blunt heads farting'. He could not face them, and in line thirty-one he 'sickened, turned and ran', such was his revulsion. He personifies them as 'great slime kings' and in the following line states that they had assembled at the flax-dam for revenge: 'gathered there for vengeance' for stolen frogspawn. Heaney's final line expresses how far his imagination as a child took hold: 'if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it'. This is a nightmare image where the spawn becomes powerful and grabs the child, reversing the original roles.

The structure of the poem, where the first stanza is almost twice the length of the first, resembles that of Heaney's 'Blackberry-Picking'. Both poems describe an enjoyable childhood experience in the first stanza which turns sour in the second, linking form to meaning. The feeling of disillusion and disappointment following pleasure is a common theme in these two poems. 'Death of a Naturalist' links language to meaning as well, the vivid imagery of the second stanza creating a marked contrast with the simple, childlike wording of lines fifteen to twenty-one. There is a wealth of description here and we can sympathise with the child's disgust of the creatures that evolved from his precious jars of frogspawn.

What were they like?

An English poet who moved to New York as a young adult, Denise Levertov voices her opposition to the USA's role in the Vietnam War in her poem 'What Were They Like?' The poem is presented in a particularly unusual way, where the first stanza consists of a series of numbered questions asking about certain aspects of the Vietnamese people's way of life. The second stanza gives answers to each of these questions, and they are also numbered so that it is easy to tell which reply relates to which question.

The fact that the questions in the first stanza are all in the past tense immediately leads us to feel that this race of people has now died out. Four of the questions repeat the opening phrase 'Did they...?' The tone of the questions conveys a sense that these were people who were gentle and close to nature. The second question, for example, asks 'Did they hold ceremonies / to reverence the opening of buds?' This question gives the impression that worship was an important part of their lives, and that they respected nature, realising that the growth of new plants and flowers was a precious sign of life. The third question asks 'Were they inclined to quiet laughter?' This paints a picture of people who understood joy but experienced it in a peaceful way. The fourth question asks if they used the natural elements of bone, ivory, jade and silver for decoration, implying that they loved natural beauty. The two final questions concern poetry, 'speech and singing', wondering if they had an 'epic poem' and also if they perhaps felt that speaking and singing were essentially one and the same.

The very first question in stanza one asks if 'the people of Viet Nam / used lanterns of stone', stone again being a natural substance. As we begin to read the answers to the questions in stanza two, we soon sense a difference in tone as the first line tells us 'Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.' This is not of course a direct answer to the question, but underlines the ideas of the first stanza, where it is suggested that these people appreciated joy and 'quiet laughter'. 'Turned to stone', on the other hand, tells us that their joy was wiped out, and their hearts became heavy. The next line, still answering the first question but now more directly, begins 'It is not remembered...' This phrase, repeated in the reply to the fifth question, creates a feeling that much of the knowledge of the Vietnamese people has been lost. No-one knows whether 'stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways'.

The answer to question two contains a poignant contrast of ideas. The fact that it begins with the word 'perhaps' reinforces the feeling that we cannot be certain of the traditions of a race of people that has been wiped out by war. The act of coming together to 'delight in blossom' is immediately followed by the harsh statement 'but after the children were killed / there were no more buds)'. No children, no buds, no life, no growth; what was there for these people to give thanks for in worship?

The third and fourth questions have replies that imply destruction by fire during the war. The answer to question three is the briefest one, telling us that 'laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.' Bitter can of course have two meanings: either a bitter taste, and here of course there is a reference to the mouth, or a bitter feeling, which is particularly poignant here, as the quiet laughter has transformed into appalling suffering. The reply to the fourth question begins 'A dream ago, perhaps,' reiterating the idea of uncertainty. It continues 'Ornament is for joy. / All the bones were charred,' leaving us in no doubt that there was no place for lightheartedness in the wake of the destruction of war.

The reply to the fifth question is the most detailed one, and also the one that bears the closest resemblance to the traditional concept of poetic description. It echoes the phrase 'It is not remembered' of the first answer, going on to say that most of the people were peasants who spent their lives 'in rice and bamboo'. They were cultivators, not destroyers. What follows is a descriptive image of 'peaceful clouds reflected in paddies', paddies being waterlogged fields where the rice was grown. Just as uncertainty was previously expressed by 'perhaps', here we have 'maybe': 'maybe fathers told their sons old tales'. The next two lines, however, are in sharp contrast once again, as these images or 'mirrors' were destroyed by bombing. This peaceful agricultural way of life was brought to an abrupt end, when 'there was time only to scream.'

The word scream is also in contrast to 'an echo yet / of their speech' at the start of the reply to the sixth and final question. Levertov uses a simile for their speech 'which was like a song', and the idea of joy is portrayed again. Their singing is compared to 'the flight of moths in the moonlight', creating the impression of delicateness and transitoriness. The final line of the poem presents one more question: 'Who can say?' emphasizing once more the uncertainty of the facts that are known about the people of Viet Nam. The poem ends with a brief sentence, 'It is silent now.' This is not a silence akin to that of the 'quiet laughter' of the third question, however. It is the silence of complete destruction, of a people that no longer exist.

We come away from this poem with a sense that the people being focused on here were gentle, peaceful folk who led a simple lifestyle close to nature; they had a strong sense of joy and delighted in creation and growth. The brutality of the way they were destroyed during the Vietnam War is brought home to us by the contrast of their quiet ways and the harsh reality of the bombing that wiped them out.

Nothing's Changed

'Nothing's Changed' is the expression of Tatamkhulu Afrika's opposition to the system of apartheid in South Africa, under which black people were denied many of their basic rights, and were not allowed to mix freely with white people. Afrika was actually born in Egypt but went to live in South Africa as a young child. Here he returns to South Africa after the apartheid system had been abolished, but finds that black people still do not have equal rights.

The first of the seven stanzas takes the form of a single sentence that spans eight lines. The opening line of the second stanza tells us that the first stanza is a description of District Six, a run-down area of the city of Cape Town. The poet walks through stones, grasses, rubbish and weeds that he sees as 'amiable', or friendly. In three instances the verbs 'click', 'thrust' and 'crunch' are emphasised by their position at the end of a line.

In stanza two, the poet tells us that there is no sign to say which district this is, but he knows instinctively that it is District Six. His recognition of the place is conveyed through a list of parts of his body that know exactly where he is: 'the skin about my bones, / and the soft labouring of my lungs'; repetition of the pronoun 'my' reinforces his personal experience of this place. The final two lines of this stanza introduce the first sign of his intense emotion: 'the hot, white, inwards turning / anger of my eyes'.

The third stanza describes a 'new, up-market' restaurant that is for white people only. The opening word of the stanza, 'Brash', tells us immediately how showy this place is (and, ironically, 'brash' can sometimes mean white-faced). The alliteration in the phrase 'flaring like a flag' in the following line continues to convey the idea that this restaurant asserts itself even in its name. Amongst the weeds, pine trees (Port Jackson trees) are beginning to establish a more sophisticated look for the surrounding area. The restaurant offers 'haute cuisine' (high-class, elegant food) and the presence of a guard is necessary to ensure that only white people enter.

Stanza four is the mid-point of the poem and draws attention to itself since it consists of just two lines: 'No sign says it is: but we know where we belong'. Again, the poet does not need a sign to spell out what type of place this is. Using the pronoun 'we' shows that he identifies with the black people, even though he was not one of them by birth.

In the fifth stanza, the poet continues to describe the restaurant. He knows what he will see inside it, but presses his nose 'to the clear panes' to confirm his suspicions. Everything is superior: 'crushed ice white glass', a linen tablecloth, and a rose on each table.

The penultimate stanza sets up a sharp contrast whereby Afrika introduces 'a working-man's cafe' just a little way away from the restaurant. Here, bunny chows are served: half loaves of bread are scooped out, filled with curry, and this is then eaten with the hands by dipping in the scooped out bread. Nothing could be further from the images of the third and fifth stanzas, as the workers sit at plastic tables, wiping their hands on their clothes, 'spit a little on the floor'. The last line here, 'it's in the bone' tells us that these people behave like this instinctively, never having entered a place where that kind of behaviour would be frowned upon.

The final stanza returns us to the up-market inn, or restaurant, and the poet moves back from the window, feeling that he is back in his childhood days at the time of the apartheid system. He still feels the same anger against that system, and has a fierce impulse to smash the glass: 'Hands burn / for a stone, a bomb'. The reason is obvious from the poem's final line, reiterating the title, 'Nothing's changed.' The black people of this region are still treated as if they are inferior.

This is a strong, politically emotional poem in which Tatamkhulu Afrika, although not black himself, speaks out against the injustice of the system of government in South Africa. His use of sharp contrast between the eating places of the white people in a classy restaurant and the black people in a working-man's cafe makes his message strike home with a direct forcefulness, and we sense his anger running through the poem's seven stanzas.

Figures of Speech in Poetry

Anyone studying English Language and Literature has to be able to analyse poetry, and recognising figures of speech and being able to quote them and comment on them will make any essay more impressive. There again, actually using them yourself in creative writing or descriptive writing brings your work alive and gives it an extra dimension. Various figures of speech are explained here; the examples quoted are from the AQA Anthology for GCSE English Language and Literature (Specification A) for 2005 onwards. (The book is published by Oxford University Press but is only distributed in secondary schools; copies can sometimes be found on Ebay.)

ALLITERATION

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Alliteration is the repetition of consonants, usually at the beginnings of words in close succession.

Nissim Ezekiel uses this device in his poem 'Night of the Scorpion' in which the phrases 'stung by a scorpion' 'parting with his poison' describe his memory of the evening his mother was the victim of a scorpion's sting but thanked God it had chosen her and not her children. The 'drizzle of one despondent dawn' sets a dismal tone at the beginning of Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe's 'Vultures'.

Moniza Alvi uses alliteration in her poem 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan' which expresses her confusion at being of mixed nationality and not fully belonging anywhere. After moving to England, she hears of the conflict in Pakistan, which she describes as 'a fractured land/throbbing through newsprint'.

In her poem 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy imagines how Shakespeare's wife would have thought of him as 'My living laughing love'. Simon Armitage picks a more up-to-date character in 'Kid', where the narrator, Batman's sidekick Robin, has finally grown up and says Batman has 'let me loose to wander/leeward, freely'.

A very different atmosphere is created by alliteration in Walt Whitman's poem 'Patrolling Barnegat' describing a storm at sea: 'On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting'. Still threatening, but in a very different way, is Robert Browning's female narrator in 'The Laboratory', describing in minute detail the process as she mixes a poisonous potion to inflict upon her lover's new-found mistress: 'moisten and mash up thy paste,/Pound at thy powder'. A more majestic picture is created by Alfred Tennyson in his brief poem 'The Eagle': 'He clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands'.

ASSONANCE

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This is the repetition of vowel sounds in words.

Seamus Heaney shows himself to be a grand master of assonance in his poem 'Death of a Naturalist' where he describes how 'gross-bellied frogs were cocked on sods'. The more poignant 'Mid-Term Break' tells how he was brought home from boarding school following the death of his four-year-old brother in a road accident. Waiting for neighbours to collect him from school, he hears 'bells knelling'; on the morning of the funeral he sees the body 'stanched and bandaged' and notices the bruise on the left temple.

In a similar vein, Gillian Clarke's 'Cold Knap Lake' recounts how a drowning child is pulled from the lake. She describes the murky depths of the water 'after the treading, heavy webs of swans' that she feels may hide other disturbing memories.

On a lighter note, John Clare's 'Sonnet' describes the delights of nature in summer 'Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood': notice that here he is also using alliteration and a simile, so be on the lookout for descriptions that combine more than one figure of speech.

CONTRAST

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Contrast is the juxtaposition of opposites to create a striking effect.

Tatamkhulu Afrika's poem 'Nothing's Changed' deals with the idea that South Africa remained as it was even after black people were accorded the same rights as white people. He shows this by describing an 'up-market, haute cuisine' 'whites only inn' where he presses his nose up against the window to see 'crushed ice white glass,/linen falls,/the single rose' inside. In contrast, the black Africans have to go to a cheap 'working man's cafe' that 'sells/bunny chows..... eat/it at a plastic table's top'. He describes how the workers here instinctively wipe their fingers on their jeans, then 'spit a little on the floor'.

But is the USA very different? Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes' is set in San Francisco. Stuck in a traffic jam at a red light, he focuses on the juxtaposition of a garbage truck and its two occupants and a Mercedes in which are seated an architect and a 'young blond woman': 'two garbagemen in red plastic blazers..... looking down into/an elegant open Mercedes/with an elegant couple in it'. In the closing stanza Ferlinghetti imagines that anything could have happened in that short space of time that brought these people so close together: 'and the very red light for an instant/holding all four close together/as if anything at all were possible/between them'.

METAPHOR

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A metaphor compares something to something else by saying it IS something else or DOES something else, as in the line from the song 'I've got you under my skin': you cannot literally be under someone else's skin. The English cricketer Fred Truman once famously said 'I don't use metaphors. I don't like to beat about the bush,' which of course is itself a metaphor.

Simon Armitage's poem that begins 'Mother, any distance greater than a single span' recounts how his mother came to help him measure up a house he was moving into, but the entire poem appears to be a metaphor for his changing relationship with his mother as he grows up and becomes independent. She stays downstairs, firmly grasping the 'zero-end' of the spool of tape, while he climbs the stairs with the tape, 'unreeling years between us', seeing his mother as an 'anchor' and himself as a 'kite', gaining his freedom but not breaking the bond.

The poem 'Search for my Tongue' by Sujata Bhatt also uses an extended metaphor (over the course of several lines of the poem) to express the idea that her mother tongue insists on making its presence felt, and seems to grow like a plant: 'the bud opens, ..... it blossoms out of my mouth.'

'Catrin' by Gillian Clarke expresses the desire of both mother and child to establish their separate identities. At the time of birth, the umbilical cord is described by the metaphor 'the tight/red rope of love' that mother and baby are fighting over.

In 'Anne Hathaway' Carol Ann Duffy imagines that Shakespeare's wife felt that the nights she spent with her husband took her to a world of fantasy: 'My lover's words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses to these lips' skilfully combines both metaphor and simile in one image.

In a far less magical vein, Charles Tichbourne wrote 'Tichbourne's Elegy' in the Tower of London in 1586 before his execution. He was still young at the time, and the poem contains a number of metaphors expressing his regret that he will not be able to live out the course of his life:

'My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green;

...My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun.'

ONOMATOPOEIA

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Although a long word and a difficult one to spell, it can often be something as short as: pop! Onomatopoeia means using a word that actually sounds like the sound it is describing.

Several of Seamus Heaney's poems portray his admiration for his father and grandfather, who both farmed the land. Remembering his grandfather cutting turf in the poem 'Digging', Heaney decribes the sound as 'the squelch and slap of soggy peat'.

Gillian Clarke's 'Baby-sitting' is an honest expression of the lack of a bond between herself and the baby she is looking after. She describes the sounds of the sleeping infant as 'a snuffly/roseate, bubbling sleep;' and we can just imagine the little sounds she is hearing.

In 'We Remember Your Childhood Well', Carol Ann Duffy constructs' a scene where adults are answering what are apparently the accusations of their child, now grown up. 'Call back the sound of their voices. Boom. Boom. Boom.'

OXYMORON

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Not as common as some other figures or speech, an oxymoron puts two complete opposites together in the same phrase.

Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Havisham' centres on the elderly Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens's novel 'Great Expectations'. Jilted on her wedding day, she was never able to forgive or forget the gentleman in question. The opening line of Duffy's poem refers to him as her 'Beloved sweetheart bastard'. Towards the end of the poem the oxymoron 'Love's/hate behind a white veil' shows the close link between the two extreme emotions.

PERSONIFICATION

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Personification involves giving things the characteristics of people.

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist' is one of the most descriptive poems in the anthology; he sets the scene at a dam where 'Bubbles gargled delicately' and the flax rotted under 'the punishing sun'.

John Agard's poem 'Half-Caste' written in non-standard English, uses vivid imagery to express his frustration at the attitude people have towards him because of his mixed nationality. He uses personification to describe the persistance of heavy clouds in Britain: 'some o dem cloud..... so spiteful dem dont want de sun pass ah rass'. (Some of those clouds are so spiteful they don't want the sun to pass over us.)

In a celebration of freedom from the routine of daily life, kitchen utensils as well as vegetables are personified in 'This Room' by Imtiaz Dharker: 'Pots and pans... clang/past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,/fly by the ceiling fan.'

Simon Armitage's poem 'Hitcher' describes the violent reaction of an anti-social driver who picks up a hitch-hiker that seems to have the freedom he fiercely covets. After attacking him and throwing him out of his car, the narrator remembers how the hitcher 'said he liked the breeze/to run its fingers/through his hair.'

SIMILE

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A simile is a way of comparing one thing to another using either 'like' or 'as'.

'The flung spray..... spits like a tame cat/Turned savage' describes the ferocity of the wind lashing at the sea in Seamus Heaney's 'Storm on the Island'. The same poet deals with childhood memories in 'Blackberry Picking' where he remembers the taste of the season's first blackberyy: 'its flesh was sweet like thickened wine'.

A more majestic picture of nature is given in Alfred Tennyson's 'The Eagle'; the bird of prey stands on a mountain top and then suddenly 'like a thunderbolt he falls', swooping down on the prey he has been watching. John Clare shows his admiration of nature in summer in his 'Sonnet': 'reed clumps rustle like wind shook wood', where he combines alliteration and assonance with his simile.

'The skin cracks like a pod' describes the effect of drought in an Indian village in the poem 'Blessing' by Imtiaz Dharker, whereupon a pipe bursts and adults and children alike come running to collect the precious water.

'A salwar kameez..... glistening like an orange split open' describes the brilliant colour of the traditional Pakistani clothes sent to her in England in Moniza Alvi's 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan'.

'Labourers swarm..... like crows attacking crow-black fields' focuses on the crowds of field-workers in Seamus Heaney's 'At a Potato Digging'. In contrast 'but God, ever nigh,/Appeared like his father in white' to rescue a child whose father had left him behind whilst walking home in the dark in 'The Little boy Found' by William Blake.

In 'Sonnet 130' William Shakespeare uses a simile in the opposite way when he says 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;' and yet he values her love above everything.

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The work of these poets is of course published in other collections besides the GCSE Anthology mentioned in my introduction. Faber & Faber Ltd publish the work of Seamus Heaney and that of Simon Armitage, whilst Carol Ann Duffy's poetry is published by Macmillan. Gillian Clarke is published by Carcanet Press Ltd.

Analysing poetry obviously involves more than just discussing figures of speech; style, structure, rhythm, and rhyme are all important. Being able to recognise figures of speech will, however, help in understanding the imagery and meaning of a poem and encourage students perhaps to use figurative language in their own writing.

Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes' recalls a moment in time when a garbage truck and a Mercedes were juxtaposed whilst waiting at a red traffic light, and is built upon the contrast between the two sets of people in these vehicles.

This 'event' took place at nine in the morning in San Francisco city centre. The first stanza looks at the garbage truck and its occupants; the colours are very vivid: the truck itself bright yellow, and the men's plastic blazers red, echoing the colour of the traffic light that has forced them to stop. The two garbagemen are hanging on to the back of the truck, one on each side, looking down at the 'elegant couple' in the Mercedes.

Stanza two focuses on the driver and passenger in the Mercedes. Descriptions such as 'hip three-piece linen suit' (for the driver) and 'casually coifed' (for the female passenger) reinforce their elegance. Both are blond. The man, we are told, is an architect and the couple are one their way to his office.

The third stanza looks again at the garbagemen, who have just finished their work having been up since four in the morning. 'Grungy' leaves us in no doubt as to the state they are in. One is considerably older than the other, and Ferlinghetti uses the simile 'looking down like some / gargoyle Quasimodo' to describe the way in which he is hunched and peering down on the couple in the Mercedes. The description is not an appealing one. The younger garbageman, however, is about the same age as the architect and, like him, has 'sunglasses & long hair': they are similar in these ways yet worlds apart.

In the fourth stanza we are again reminded that the garbagemen, or 'scavengers', are 'gazing down' at the 'cool couple' in the Mercedes. Ferlinghetti imagines that it is as though they are watching an advert on television, an 'odorless TV ad', unreal, untouchable. But in TV commercials anything can happen, and perhaps they are waiting for something to happen.

The final stanza reminds us that they are at a traffic light, a 'very red light', caught for just a short space of time. The light is 'holding all four close together' although it is unlikely that such different types of people would come so physically close in any other way than this chance occurrence. As in the previous stanza, Ferlinghetti sees that it is 'as if anything at all were possible / between them': anything could happen because they are in such close proximity. The distance he describes with the metaphor 'small gulf', and then immediately employs another metaphor, 'high seas of democracy' to create an image of the bizarre juxtapositions that can randomly occur in what is supposedly a highly civilized society.

The lines of poetry here flow back and forth with large indentations, as though we are ourselves are looking back and forth between the garbagemen and the couple in the Mercedes. The spaces that are formed in this way make it quite difficult to distinguish between one stanza and another. The lack of punctuation adds to the sense of a continuous flow, a gaze shifting constantly from truck to car and back again in the short period of time that they were caught at the red light together.

Ferlinghetti has frozen a brief moment in time when we see the extremes of this society, the two garbagement, dirty and exhausted, and the architect and his female companion, beautifully dressed and fresh at the start of their day. The driver and the younger garbagemen are almost the same age, both have long hair and wear sunglasses, and yet they are worlds apart. This is a democracy, but as Ferlinghetti shows us, the gap between rich and poor is still a vast one. When we see the two together in this way, the contrast is striking.

Not My Business

Hailing from Nigeria, Niyi Osundare finds an outlet in his poem 'Not my Business' to express his views of the actions taken by repressive regimes such as the one that exists in his own country.

The first three stanzas of this four-stanza poem are identical in structure. The first four lines of each describe how acquaintances of the narrator disappeared in either brutal or mysterious circumstances. In the first stanza, Akanni is beaten and pushed inside a jeep; Osundare uses personification to create this image, describing how the victim was 'stuffed ... down the belly' of the jeep. The final three lines of this stanza, which are completely identical to those of the following two stanzas, convey the reaction of the narrator to this sudden, shocking event. Using the metaphor 'So long they don't take the yam / From my savouring mouth?' he considers that it is none of his business. As long as it doesn't affect him directly, why should he care?

The second stanza recounts how 'they' took Danladi away 'to a lengthy absence'. He was taken during the night: not just taken, but dragged out in an episode that woke everyone in the house. Osundare uses the word 'booted' to convey the aggression here. Stanza three is somewhat less violent but equally chilling, showing that women were not spared from similar treatment. Chinwe was sacked from her job without any explanation or warning. The second and third stanzas are concluded in the same way as the first: the narrator is still adamant that he doesn't have to bother about such events, as long as 'they' leave him alone.

The fourth and final stanza, however, is in stark contrast to the first three. The narrator is sitting down to eat his yam when a knock comes on the door. He describes his reaction in no uncertain terms: 'A knock on the door froze my hungry hand.' The jeep is waiting for him this time, and he again uses personification to project his feelings onto his lawn, describing it as 'bewildered'. The ominous tone of the final line describing the jeep 'Waiting, waiting in its usual silence' is perhaps even more chilling than the contrasting account of the brutality of the events of the first two stanzas.

The fact the Osundare uses first names to recount what happened to Akanni, Danladi and Chinwe shows that these were either members of his family, housemates or close friends. It is striking that the events took place at different times of day: morning in the first stanza, night in the second, no specified time but presumably morning in the third, and evening in the fourth. This makes us feel that these people would always have to be on the alert and could be arrested or lose their job at any moment. Yet, seeing what happened to those close to him and knowing that it could happen at any time, the narrator did not initially seem to think that he was in any danger. The irony of course is in the title, 'Not my Business', since the jeep eventually came for the narrator himself.

Osundare here conveys the idea that people can disappear or lose their jobs for no apparent reason in places such as Nigeria. He expresses his concern that people may not care that this is happening, as long as they can carry on with their own lives as normal. Yet it can happen to anyone. Observers of such a situation need to care about such injustice and take action to prevent oppression.