Preview

The Poems ‘Childhood’ by Frances Cornford and ‘My Parents’ by Stephen Spender Both Have a Speaker Looking Back in Time

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
570 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Poems ‘Childhood’ by Frances Cornford and ‘My Parents’ by Stephen Spender Both Have a Speaker Looking Back in Time
Essay One - Poetry

The poems ‘Childhood’ by Frances Cornford and ‘My Parents’ by Stephen Spender both have a speaker looking back in time. However, they differ significantly in many areas. Such as, in form, as Childhood only has one stanza and My Parents has three, tone, Childhood having a tone of confusion and My Parents with a tone of envy, and also in theme, Childhood portraying the theme of an adult looking back at her ‘helpless’ childhood and My Parents looking at the sheltered life of a child in middle compared to the unsheltered life in working class.

The form of Childhood and My Parents is significantly different. Childhood is set out with one stanza and uses rhyming couplets, however in the last four lines the couplets are changed because of the Volta. In the poem Childhood, punctuation is very important in portraying the tone of the speaker, for example before the Volta the line is shorter than others and also has a full stop to create a dramatic pause. My Parents, however, is written in three stanzas with no rhyme. There is also little punctuation throughout the poem and therefore creates a faster poem.

Childhood and My Parents differ significantly in their tone. The speaker of Childhood, which could be assumed as an adult looking back at their childhood, begins the poem with a tone of confusion when she states ‘I used to think’. However, throughout the poem the speaker understands the idea that no matter what age, everyone is in a sense of childhood. This is shown when the speaker says ‘and I knew then that she was helplessly old, as I was helplessly young’. My Parents, however, begins with a fearful tone, which is shown when the speaker repeats ‘I feared’. However, as the poem goes on a sense on envy appears when the speaker says ‘I longed to forgive them’.

The themes of Childhood and My Parents also differ extensively. Childhood embraces the idea that no matter what age everyone is in a sense of childhood. The speaker discovers this by

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    What meaning have you derived from Harwood’s poetry? Refer to 3 poems and include theoretical readings.…

    • 1491 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fifth Business

    • 1205 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Our childhood plays a significant role in defining the kind of person that we become and the type of life that we live.…

    • 1205 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both “Before You Were Mine” by Carol Ann Duffy and “Mother Any Distance” by Simon Armitage focus on the role of being a mother and having to give up something. In “Before You Were Mine” its Carol Ann Duffy’s mother letting go and giving up her carefree lifestyle, to take up the important role of a mother. Whereas in “Mother Any Distance” its Simon Armitage’s mother realising she has to let her son grow up and leave her grasps.…

    • 1478 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gwen Harwood’s coherent use of form and language to produce an integrated whole in terms of meaning and value affirm the textual integrity of her work “Father and Child”. The poem delicately integrates a host of re-iterated universal motifs to produce the poem as a collective whole and confirms Gwen Harwood’s ability to transcend time in her poetry so that it can be accepted in a great deal of contexts.…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gwen Harwood’s poetry focuses on the concepts of loss and consolation, which, through her exploration of universal themes and deft use of poetic and literary techniques, has continued to engage readers over the ages. My understanding of her poems resonates with these ideas about them, as does it the notion that Harwood’s poetry examines ideas of the growth towards maturity, understanding and wisdom, and the connection this shares with the conventional images of youth and age. The poems “Father and Child” and “Mother Who Gave Me Life” are prime examples of these core ideas being conveyed explicitly through Harwood’s language, context and construction of poems.…

    • 933 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The relationship between father and son seems to be one of tension and distance as conveyed to the readers at first. For instance, the narrator "looks down" at his father digging, as shown in the second stanza, which can either be interpreted in two ways. One way is that the narrator is situated above his father who is in the fields digging, or another way in which the narrator looks down upon his father and sees no value in his occupation. As shown, the narrator's position is above his father because he has an education, which is reinforced from the start: the narrator is a writer, and most likely received more education than his father who is a potato farmer. The mood reinforces the distant relationship between the father and the son. The mood of the poem at first is solemn and grave. This is exemplified in the onomatopoeia; "a clean, rasping sound" In…

    • 616 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    The second part of the poem ‘Nightfall’ continues the story of the child forty years from ‘Barn owl’, where she had lost her innocence by shooting an owl and this had resulted in a heavy hearted guilt which was caused by her unknowing and stubborn actions. The poem represents death closing in on the father, and the limitations of time on their relationship that was never experienced before in her younger years. The father, who in the first poem is depicted as an “old no-sayer”, is now held in high esteem, he is admired and respected as an “old king”. The extended metaphor “Since there is no more to taste ripeness is plainly all. Father we pick our last fruits of the temporal.” Appeals to our senses and is now an aural metaphor, it illustrates the father’s life becoming fulfilled or ripe, it has come near to its end and the father and child will now spend or pick the last moments of the father’s life together. Over time her appreciation of her father has changed, this is shown through “Who can be what you were?” and “Old King, your marvellous journey’s done.” She has realised the valuable life her father has led and the great loss that will be felt after he is gone. The child, now a grown woman learns another lesson about death, it can be quiet and peaceful, and “Your night and day…

    • 1245 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gwen Harwood Essay Example

    • 1185 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Opportunities for an individual to develop understanding of themselves stem from the experiences attained on their journey through life. The elements which contribute to life are explored throughout Gwen Harwood’s poems, At Mornington and Mother Who Gave Me Life, where the recollection of various events are presented as influences on the individual’s perception of the continuity of life. Both poems examine the connections between people and death in relation to personal connections with the persona’s father or mother. By encompassing aspects of human nature and life’s journey, Harwood addresses memories and relationships which contribute to one’s awareness of life.…

    • 1185 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Story By Li-Young Lee

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Time has the tendency to impact everyone and everything. In the poem “A Story” Li-Young Lee reveals the intimate yet short lived relationship of the father and the son through the use of dialogue, conflict and point of view to hint at the inevitably of children branching out and possibly surpassing their parents. Emphasized through the differing perspectives of the father and son Lee highlights the innocence of young children and parents and their changing relationship over time.…

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sharon Olds’ poem “I Go Back to May 1937” is written as if the speaker; which appears to be female is looking back in time to when he or she’s parents first met and married. The speaker throughout the poem does not seem pleased with the events that unfolded thereafter, but nonetheless understands that there is nothing that she could have done to stop it from happening. The poem gives a short glimpse into the life the couple had and the effect it had on the child/narrator. The poem is almost a flashback, but instead of first person point of view, it is told from the perception of the child’s viewpoint, which seems predominately that of despair and hopelessness.…

    • 660 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sgee

    • 1090 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Harwood’s ‘The Violets’, ‘Sharpness of Death’, and ‘Father and Child’ have significantly enriched my understanding of the great ideas of the shift from innocence to experience, the confrontation with mortality, and the transience of time. These ideas are separately examined in ‘The Violets’ and ‘Sharpness of Death’, but they are collectively portrayed in ‘Father and Child’, in which the transition from childhood to adulthood is a result of the confrontation with mortality. Since these ideas are timeless, readers are able to engage with the poems and understand Harwood’s poetry.…

    • 1090 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the past, some children had an actual childhood, they got to go school, come home and play with their friends. However, some people weren’t as rich and some of them needed to provide for their families. This caused physical and emotional pain for the kids that needed to work all day. Some of the children who didn’t have to endure all that pain, didn’t even know they were wearing the dresses or getting warm by the coal young children worked to produce.…

    • 387 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    ottawa charter

    • 564 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The first poem has two comparable contexts. It deals the issue of relationshps between the generations (father & son) and the issue of the adaptation of migrants from an old European culture to the new Australian society.…

    • 564 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the ages, authors have been known to use many of their life experiences in their literary works. They use certain moments that have been imprinted in their heads, because in some way these specific experiences have changed their lives. For instance, Theodore Roethke wrote the poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” in which he writes about a moment from his early childhood that probably affected him so deeply that he was never able to forget about it. This shows that certain moments in our childhood are particularly crucial to the way we turn out to be as adults.…

    • 1057 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.…

    • 1304 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays