Comparing Texts.
Compare how Boat Stealing and Darling Thrush present a spiritual experience.
Introduction.
Identify a common theme using the title. Indicate how the idea of spirituality can be identified in both poems.
- Emotional resonance.
- Natural Surroundings. The diminishment of the human.
- A special moment outside ‘normal’ experience.
- A character at a crossroads.
- Innocence. Human fallibility.
- Awe. Depression. Despair. Away from faith.
- Abandonment.
- Bathos. Animal world.
The first paragraph of analysis.
Then make your first paragraph of analysis take up your idea expressed as your theme.
Often a good idea to explore the beginning of the texts as you can explore setting and tone straight away. Good anchors. What do they share? Keep it clear and simple.
Move from the first poem to the second. Show the commonality of their theme. Identify a language feature or technique to reinforce your idea. You could, if you so wish, then contrast the poems as well. ‘Although both poems reveal nature’s power and beauty, the malignity in the first poem is of a different kind to the second. This is because…’
Second paragraph.
Move the analysis on. Take up another idea relating to the title and use the language of your introduction again too. Keep your focus tightly constructed.
These moments from the poems can be later on in the poem, thus reinforcing the development of each poem’s thesis.
Later, Wordsworth’s narrator witnesses …….this deepens his sense of awe and the grandeur of the natural world…yet the poet is also aware of his smallness in a world that… Likewise in Hardy’s poem the poet is driven by emotion too. However, the emotion is more related to depression and even cynicism because…we see this in…..which is unlike the …..
Third Paragraph/ fourth Paragraphs.
Draw out a sense of the poems’ development. Make sure that you make the examiner aware of your feelings/ideas about the way the poems are structured.
At this point, it may be that the poems are now more different than the same as the poems may have moved away from the emotional states represented at the beginning. They may resolve the problem very differently.
Shift happens but how and where?
Effect on the poets and on the reader.
Final sense of hope or despair? Acceptance etc.
Resolution or abstraction?
Concluding comment.
Relate back to the question and leave with a final, personal impression.
