Poetry Essay

There are themes in poetry , which require special mastery - they are life and death . These are the themes when the philosophies of authors reveal themselves to a full extent and where the poetic skill manifests itself most brightly . The poem Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins and I heard a fly buzz when I died by Emily Dickinson refer to these to opposite concepts . This is an important but not the only reason why I chose to compare them . The point is that besides the difference in subjects the tow poets are absolutely different

in the way how they perceive the world . While Hopkins is profoundly religious and admirable about life God gave to people , the only problem being people 's sins Dickinson is merciless in her showing the routine and materialistic side of death , the emptiness , the absence of glory , the emptiness , which accompanies it . For me , it is exclusively interesting to write about two absolutely different ways of seeing the world and the place of a human in it

The poem Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins is an allegorical vision this season in all its beauty and blossom as the Eden the way it was before the earth was tarred by sin . The religious allusion is not surprising if we take into account the personality of the poet and the epoch he lived in . The Victorian epoch , his service as a Catholic priest , and influence of Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite authors - that 's what marks his poetry

Structurally , the poem is organized as a continuous flow without being broken into quatrains . The parallel rhyming makes it similar to folk poetry , which he himself called sprung rhythm

The first thing that reaches the ear when reading this poem is not even the idea of it but the unique sounding , which make it flow like a song How does the author achieve this effect of musicality ? It is easy to notice that he resorts to such a device as alliteration more willingly than an average poet would do , and no doubt it is justified by demands of the form . More than that , to achieve a better impact on the reader Hopkins in most cases combines alliteration with assonance and /or consonance . The examples of this combined musical device , to name a few are : weeds- wheels , rinse-wring , being beginning , lovely-lush etc . The free , flowing structure of the poem and the songlike sound stress the idea of freshness and innocence the author seeks to create . The author appeals to the senses of seeing , hearing and perceiving when choosing the images for his poem . Thus , for example , when he speaks of glassy peartree leaves ' the felling is the reader can both see and touch them Apart of the impression of novelty and innocence , another one is that of abundance and profusion

Such words as long , lovely and lush , richness , juice and joy ' greatly contribute to the extended metaphor of the Eden garden The bitter note is given to the picture by the foreshadowing that this...