Birds The Owl And The Oven Bird
Thomas and Frost both write about birds. Compare and contrast two poems, one by each poet, taking account of the methods (the situation of the speaker, and the form, structure and language, including imagery and tones) which each poet uses to write about birds.
Both Edward Thomas and Robert Frost write about birds in their poems ‘The Owl’ and ‘The Oven Bird’. ‘The Oven Bird’ by Robert Frost was written in 1916 and published in the Mountain Interval. It is a poem about an Oven Bird who sits on a tree on a mid-summer’s evening and sings about the coming of winter. There is a certain sadness in the song of the bird as it rues the falling of the leaves of the cherry blossom. Frost ends the poem with a question, “what to make of a diminished thing?” which sticks in the reader’s mind and makes them contemplate about their own lives. In contrast to this, Edward Thomas's poem ‘The Owl’ tells the story of a soldier who escapes from the battlefield, leaving his fellow-soldiers struggling with death. After the tiresome journey down the hill, he is hungry, exhausted and cold in the freezing winter night and decides to have “food, fire and rest” at an inn. He enters the snug private place of comfort, completely cut off from the outer world, without one haunting link that remains, the sad hooting of an owl that rends the nocturnal silence and enters his relaxing private space to make it bristle with guilt-complex, irony and the painful misery of the suffering humanity. It turns his food tasteless; too salty to take as he feels the pang for leaving his friends exposed to mortal danger, enjoying all the comforts all alone. The pathetic cry of the owl was like an epiphanic voice that purged him through an awakening of sensitivity and regret. He was “sobered” and humbled by the experience.
Frost’s the ‘Oven Bird’ is a sonnet consisting of 14 lines and thus doesn’t have any division into stanzas. As a result there is a recognisable but unconventional rhyme scheme. Frost structured
Both Edward Thomas and Robert Frost write about birds in their poems ‘The Owl’ and ‘The Oven Bird’. ‘The Oven Bird’ by Robert Frost was written in 1916 and published in the Mountain Interval. It is a poem about an Oven Bird who sits on a tree on a mid-summer’s evening and sings about the coming of winter. There is a certain sadness in the song of the bird as it rues the falling of the leaves of the cherry blossom. Frost ends the poem with a question, “what to make of a diminished thing?” which sticks in the reader’s mind and makes them contemplate about their own lives. In contrast to this, Edward Thomas's poem ‘The Owl’ tells the story of a soldier who escapes from the battlefield, leaving his fellow-soldiers struggling with death. After the tiresome journey down the hill, he is hungry, exhausted and cold in the freezing winter night and decides to have “food, fire and rest” at an inn. He enters the snug private place of comfort, completely cut off from the outer world, without one haunting link that remains, the sad hooting of an owl that rends the nocturnal silence and enters his relaxing private space to make it bristle with guilt-complex, irony and the painful misery of the suffering humanity. It turns his food tasteless; too salty to take as he feels the pang for leaving his friends exposed to mortal danger, enjoying all the comforts all alone. The pathetic cry of the owl was like an epiphanic voice that purged him through an awakening of sensitivity and regret. He was “sobered” and humbled by the experience.
Frost’s the ‘Oven Bird’ is a sonnet consisting of 14 lines and thus doesn’t have any division into stanzas. As a result there is a recognisable but unconventional rhyme scheme. Frost structured