If a composer can answer the questions, who are you? Where are you? And when are you? The responder can successfully understand the world of a text. The way a composer creates senses of Time, Place and Character is vital for this; the best use various poetic devices and techniques to do so, including mood, tone, vivid descriptive langue, and specific word choice. Through two poems, “The Jaguar” by Ted Hughes and “The African Beggar” by Raymond Tong and one novel extract “The Sun Bird” by Wilbur Smith, all studied in class and one recorded extract from a text not studied in class create time, place and character .
The poem “the Jaguar” Ted Hughes creates a strong senses of character, with hints to a time period. Hughes uses personification to create the first sense of character “the apes yawn and adore their pleas in the sun”, this quote of the first line in the poem sets a mood of bored and lethargic animals. To continue with this mood uses the simile of “tiger and lion lay still as the sun” this creates a powerful image of the extremely slow moving sun across the sky, that the only way you notice is because when you look again its moved. Character is founded in the quote”The boa-constructor’s coil is a fossil” with the used of metaphor and hyperbole, this contributes to the lethargy. There is a significant shift in mood from a bored atmosphere to the jaguar being “hurrying enraged” with the “drills of his eyes” and “short fierce fuse” like his going to explode, very powerful and the “bang of blood in the brain death ear” these all create a very different mood. Ted Hughes hints to a time period through the quotes “cage after cage seems empty” and “it might be painted on a nursery wall” using repetition and vivid descriptive language, this maintains an already existing mood of boredom and captivity the responder feels little empathy with the characters mentioned nor does the composer of the people at the zoo. “Cage after cage”,