AN EXAMPLE ANSWER!

Explore the ways in which the poets present their feelings.

'Catrin', a poem by Gillian Clarke, is an interesting and ambiguous poem which describes a rather confusing relationship between a mother and her daughter told through the eyes of the mother during child-birth. Conversely, in 'Hitcher', we are introduced to a rather different situation of a man seemingly tired of his job, and arguably his life, who apparently takes out his stress on an unsuspecting hitch-hiker: killing him.

The first thing that occurred to me is that both poets use particular lexical fields in order to present their feelings to the reader. For example, Gillian Clarke uses lexis which makes the poem seem uncomfortably tense. She uses words such as 'hot', 'fighting' and 'confrontation' which add a certain level of stress to the poem, which the reader feels. The poet may be trying to suggest that her relationship with her daughter have not always been easy and that she has seen it as a struggle at times. Similarly, Simon Armitage uses a particular lexical field in order to give his poem an uneasy tone. He uses words and phrases such as 'screaming', 'let him have it' and 'bouncing off the kerb' which are all very violent images. This suggests that Simon Armitage feels that modern life has the potential to create a violent or unpredictable streak in people.

Secondly, the poems both use different type of imagery in order to show their feelings. Simon Armitage makes his poem seem quite threatening, and shows modern life to be a bit menacing, when he personifies the 'ansafone' and has it saying 'one more sick note Mister and you're finished!'. Not only is this a little bit frightening in itself, as it makes him sound like he is on the verge of being killed, let alone fired, but also, it makes the reader feel like the world (even inanimate objects) are ganging up on this everyday man. Gillian clark uses lots of metaphors to create a similar uneasy effect. She refers to the umbilical cord as 'the red rope of love' which is a very strange image. The umbilical cord should be something which a mother loves and cherishes as her link to her child, yet here, Clarke seems to see is as an annoyance or a hindrance. She also uses a metaphor of 'painting the walls with her words' to emphasise to the reader how stressed and in pain she was as she is evidently swearing a lot.

Hope you're getting the hang of this people! Your answer will need to be longer than this obviously, but you should, by now, be seeing a pattern of how to compare. It's not rocket science!

NW