Analysis of Marrysong

Marrysong The poem ‘Marrysong’ was written by a Jamaican man whose name was Dennis Scott. Many of his poems were written it the Jamaican vernacular, yet this poem was written in a very simple language which is easy to understand by everybody. As said in the title, the poem is about marriage, and how a man tries to understand his wife, and how he makes sacrifices for her because he loves her. Scott’s poem has both structured and unstructured parts, as well as formal and informal writing. He uses different types of language uses to relate the poem to love. The sentence “He Charted”, gives the feel that the whole poem is a metaphor through the meaning of the word charted, which is mapped. This therefore gives the effect that the whole poem is a map. The poem is about a marriage, which makes you feel that it is a map to the poet’s wife. A marriage is something you do when you love someone, and someone that you love is precious to you, just as treasure is precious to everyone. This gives the feel that the poem is a treasure map to the poet’s treasure. His treasure is his wife. The idea of having a map to find her indicates that she is not something that he can find or, in this case, figure out very easily. Another form of language use that Scott uses in his poem to create effect is repetition. For example, the repetition of the word ‘year’ in the phrase “year after year”. The effect created is that of something that takes a very long time. It could be something that is never ending, or simply takes place in very long periods of time. This effect is created by the meaning of the word year, which is ‘a period of 365 days’. This in our minds is a rather long time. The repletion of the word ‘year’ causes us to think of more that one year. We also think this because of the meaning of the word ‘after’ which is ‘during the period of time following an event’. This makes us think that it is something that is never ending that the writer is doing because we know that as