GCSE Eduqas Poetry Comparisons.
Tip.
Make sure you include the central idea of the question in your opening statement. Try to problematise the relationship between the two poems. So, you might say what they share in relation to the theme/subject of the question and what might be different. If you set up a contrast or tension at the beginning of an answer, it makes it much easier to produce a comparative essay under pressure. Remember to include your own opinion too which will earn marks. You are a critic!
Let’s look at each pairing of poems and see how they might work together in an essay,
Death of a Naturalist with Hawk Roosting.
Both poems use a first person speaker to reveal their attitudes to the natural world. This investment in the first person point of view is fascinating as Heaney’s poem appears autobiographical, ‘ I would fill jampotfuls’ suggesting a recurring event from a childhood suffused with enthusiastic ‘flax-dam’ adventures, memorably recorded through sensory impressions , whilst Hughes’ imagines the voice of the hawk through the use of the dramatic monologue, through a human language that has been imagined for him by the poet. ‘I sit in the top of the wood,’ a declaration that can easily misread ‘wood’ for ‘world’ especially when the hawk believes that even the ‘sun is behind me’ a revelation that captures the apparent megalomania of the self-satisfied speaker. For if the source of all life, the ‘sun’ is supporting the predator and is even subservient, ‘behind me’ then what need has the hawk to change? But if we also recall the fact that Hughes has imposed this monologue on the hawk, then it renders the ‘voice’ of the hawk, problematic. For the apparent slippages between the bird’s claws or talons and the human ‘foot’ or ‘feet’ become more ironic when we remember who has actually written the poem and has therefore ‘scripted the bird’s behaviour. In other words, the hwk is a ‘creation’ of the poet and maybe that is way the bird’s predatory dominance may seem an imitation of human behaviour. .
Heaney’s poem explores the transformation or the ‘death’ of the idealistic, innocent young ‘naturalist’ as adolescence dawns. This is indicated by the pivotal moment recollected as ‘Then one hot day.’ The positioning of this turning point at the beginning of the second stanza reveals the major effect and drama of such a change. If the day was also ‘hot’ this might testify to the uneasiness of adolescence and the way the past has been eclipsed by the change, Thus innocence gives way to experience and the alliterative sensory details become linked to disgust and repulsion, ‘ coarse croaking,’ communicating the way that the new knowledges of reproduction ruin the sensory experience of nature. It is important however to remember that the Heaney’s relationship with nature, whether it be of innocence or darker experience, is still vividly imagined. In Hughes’ monologue by contrast, the empathy deficient hawk sees no need to change his behaviour or outlook at all. His description of the world is evoked only from his own perspective as a perfect killer,’ the earth’s face upwards for my inspection’. We witness only what he sees as interesting and that is through his own self-love , which suggests the world is there is fulfil his needs. Nature is viewed as his feeding ground and we cannot imagine the natural world surrounding the Hawk with any detail, as the only natural phenomena the Hawk seems fascinated by is himself. This is in direct contrast to Heaney who even delays the entry of hi s ‘I’ self in the poem indicating that his experience as a ‘naturalist’ is overwhelming, unlike the egotistical, complacency of Hughes’ Hawk who enshrine the pronoun, ‘I’ as the first word of the poem.
Think about:
Enthusiastic Innocence versus complacency and worldliness. Civilisation of Heaney’s narrator outraged versus the primitive, atavistic outlook of Hughes’ hawk.
Lack of change versus radical shift in focus and attitude.
Sensory details that relishes the combinations of senses experienced almost to the point of synaesthesia versus confinement of sense to sight and touch. The hawk is radically deficient in empathy?
Regular structure of the Hughes’ poem mirrors the bird’s inflexibility or need for perfect control. Heaney’s poem uses two stanzas ruptured by the break and the word ‘then’ and with investment in assonance and consonance to reveal the profound fascination of the young poet in the sensory world of the flax-dam.
Death of the naturalist signifies the birth of the poet? We cannot read the repulsion and fear literally? How could we read the Hughes’ poem as an inditement of human power as well? Remember the hawk possess human ‘feet.’ Why?
Finally, we could argue that though the hawk appears to speak throughout the poem using the dramatic monologue created by Hughes, the real voice of the Hawk is absent, so the voice we actually hear is one imposed upon nature suggesting the Hawk is ultimately silent and we are hearing a human’s imaginative creation ?
Think about change and evolution. Does evolution demand a sacrifice and a loss, hence the Heaney poem explores mourning and might suggest that recollection allows us to revisit the losses of the past and to relive them through the reanimation of language, but it is never the ‘real’ primary /original experience, though it can be hugely fertile too?
Does the ‘death’ of the innocent ‘naturalist’ overdramatise the change of outlook through repulsion, to give emphasis to the lurking reality of the embarrassment linked to growing up and becoming aware of procreation and reproduction?
Living Space and Ozymandias.
Both poems explore the significance of broken structures. These structures have been created by human beings and give testimony to very different attitudes towards life and its impermanence.
Or:
Both poems explore human created structures that are in a state of ruination due to the misuse of power and both are also narrated by witnesses who seek to understand the implications of such ruined structures too. However, Dharker’s poem seems to respect and even celebrate the ‘miraculous’ human optimism and courage of the inhabitants of the chaotic ‘living’ spaces as they defy ‘the darkness’ and find ‘light’ within. By contrast, the witnesses in Shelley’s poem seem all too aware of the hubristic implications of the dictator’s fallen statue.’ Sneer of cold command, ’ an expression that clearly survives the long dead Pharaoh and ironically preserves his egotistical self-love forever through Art rather than human immortality.
Interestingly, the apparently messy, haphazard form of Dharker’s poem mimics the chaotic ‘living space’ of the slum she is examining in India. By contrast Shelley’s use of the orderly sonnet form to give representation to Ozymandias’s futile pride, seems ironic as the only ‘love’ experienced by Ozymandias, seems to be self-love.
Think about:
The use of the present tense in Ozymandias when direct speech is deployed. ‘ My name is Ozymandias..’ Consider how haunting and ironic it might be that the profoundly flawed beliefs of the dictator have outlasted him, yet can still be heard, echoing on. Does this suggest that the beliefs of the dictator still contaminate the human world? Is the poem deconstructing the abuses of power that survive to this day? Contrast to the description that the ‘structure leans dangerously towards the miraculous’ in Living Space. The fact that the instability of the slum’s structure , does not prevent homes being created, and testifies to human fortitude and imagination. The word ‘miraculous’ underlines the surprise and even awe felt and shared by the witness(the poet). The continuation of this awe is communicated thorough the mention of the ‘eggs’ which again testify to the seemingly impossible gift of a home being created in the midst of such absence of ‘straight lines.’ Maybe the whole idea of structure and the oxymoronic ‘dangerously …miraculous’ is a huge compliment and even sustained metaphor about human courage and faith being revealed even in the most abject poverty and circumstances, ‘ over the dark edge.’ This reference to the threshold between the ‘fragile’ world of the literal and metaphorical ‘eggs’( humans perhaps?) and the uncertain world beyond inspires admiration and WONDER in the reader as well as the poet.
The heavy, absurd structure of the statue testifies to the endurance of art. And this is further emphasised by the poem itself, another work of enduring Art too. One narratorial viewpoint NESTS inside another making the story distant, exotic (‘antique’) and yet also still relevant to today because of the present tense of Ozymandias himself? Like a form of poetic TOURISM! Contrast to the fragility of the world described in Dharker’s poem, yet ironically whom do we admire most?
Nature can take away all human authority. The desert at the end of Ozymandias and the ‘slanted universe’ of Dharker’s poem, both testify to the infinitude of time and the relative nothingness of the human life. Both poems give the reader a chastening, moral lesson.
Is Ozymandias a moral poem? Does its inditement of the hubristic Ozymandias, prompt possible changes in the reader? If Ozymandias has debased ‘faith ‘ and ideas about Goid, then his fall and hubris seem a profound lesson. This is contrasted to the courage of the inhabitants of the slums in ‘Living Space.’ For enough though the poet is showing how appalling it is that humans have to line in places where nothing is literally or metaphorically ‘straight’, the ‘faith’ and ‘light’ that are represented through the eggs offer a transcendence that Ozymandias’ narcissism can never entertain.
The Soldier and Dulce et Decorum est.
Brooke’s poem appears an idealised act of patriotism if not propaganda when compared to the visceral horrors of war represented in Owen’s graphic poem. Brooke composed his bloodless, sanitised sonnet at the beginning of the First World War, certainly before the horrors of the Somme which affected the composition of Owen’s poem of 1917.
Death in Brooke seems an abstract even exciting possibility, ‘If I should die, ‘ where the conditional tense renders death hypothetical and certainly underserving of fear. This absence of fear continues throughout the whole sonnet, describing personal extinction as harmonious and enriching for any ‘foreign field’ where the dead poet’s natural ‘English’ superiority might bestow their ‘richer dust’ on such inferior places. Such nationalist sentiments would certainly have appealed to the female civilian propagandist, Jessie Pope who is the addressee ‘friend’ in Owen’s very different world of brutal, unsentimental suffering which is physically harrowing and humiliating.’ All went lame; all blind.’ Notice the repetition of the word ‘all’ which shows the inescapability and universality of the horrors of war in this ironical ‘war to end wars.’
Maybe the power of Owen’s writing emanates from its authenticity? Its witnessed immediacy generates an and horror, that the hypothetical, disembodied sonnet of Brooke can never approach. That said, Owen is not writing as a mere cathartic rant, his use of poetic techniques control his writing and ensure that the poetry is haunting and enduringly affecting.
The immediacy of Own’s act of direct, witnessed testimony gives representation to the continuous horrors of a war that destroyed the soldiers’ identities: ‘bent double…like hags.’ The soldiers are unrecognisable even to themselves. The harsh plosives and scornfully harrowing similes, give immediate expression to the anger and despair of the poet who feels that the world of the generals and the ignorant propagandists at home, have consigned the soldiers to nightmarish suffering and death: ‘he plunges at me.’ This recollection that haunts Owen reveals the effects of the war on the mental health of the survivors. Shell shock was a new phenomenon because war had become weaponised in unforeseen and most degrading and terrible ways , ‘ Gas! Gas! ‘ and so perhaps Brooke’s earlier poem can be excused for its naivete and ignorance. The fact that Brooke died in 1915 prevented him writing poems with a rather different version of the war. Maybe he too might have composed poems as angry and as visceral as Owen rather than the sanitised and inappropriate poem, The Soldier which encouraged a completely misleading version of war-fare. .
