Genre Essays

Dame Muriel Spark was an award-winning Scottish novelist. She spent several years in Central Africa, returning to Britain during World War II. Until 1957 she published only poetry and criticism, including studies of Mary Shelley and the Bront sisters. Her fiction uses satire and wit to present serious themes, often questions about good and evil. […]

Checking Out Me History alternates between two structures, marked by two different fonts. The first uses the repeated phrase “Dem tell me” to indicate the white version of history, mostly written in rhyming couplets, triplets or quatrains. Interspersed are the stories of three black historical figures: Toussaint L’Overture, Nanny de Maroon and Mary Seacole, told […]

Denise Levertov’s acclaimed poem ‘Weeping Woman’, accentuates the horrors of war, how the deeds of war do not discriminate. Through an array of literary techniques she captivates her readers, and provides an replication of the overwhelming flow of thoughts the faceless woman is experiencing, in the end Denise Levertov provides a strong definition, and portrays […]

The poem Mrs Lazarus, by Carol Ann Duffy, portrays a woman (Mrs Lazarus) going through the stages of grief after her husband passes away. In this essay, I will be exploring the ways in which Duffy conveys how grief changes over time. The poem begins with Mrs Lazarus’s state of anguish over her husband’s death. […]

Today I am going to be writing an essay on comparing and contrasting two war poems which are ‘Who’s for the Game ‘by Jessie Pope and Dulce Est Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. In the first poem ‘Who’s for the Game’ the way war is presented is very different. It is mainly propaganda for young […]

Compare and contrast any two poems to explain how the poet uses poetic techniques to suggest his thoughts and feelings about the subject I will be analysing the similarities and differences in the poems ‘Pike’ by Ted Hughes and ‘Cockroach’ by Kevin Halligan. I will focus on what techniques both poets used to achieve the […]

In Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy”, Plath makes many connections between her stifling father and her own husband. Plath discusses her conflicts with her own father, which do not end with his death, but continue when she marries a man just like her father. Plath displays a sort of evolution of her feelings for her father, […]

“Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest) / Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles/ The rushing amorous contact high in space together… ” so begins Walt Whitman’s descriptive divulgings of The Dalliance of Eagles, a poem which relates and indulges on the details of the aptly mentioned […]

When one thinks of the afterlife, they can’t help but think of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In his book, The Inferno, Dante ventures into hell, both as a poet and an epic hero. His story is obviously inspired by Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid, which depicts the epic journey, into the underworld, of Virgil’s hero […]

The poem “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump” by David Bottoms suggests that people are like rats. The narrator comments that we all crawl towards the darkness and the poem ends with the statement that we drink and load again, allowing the rats to crawl into the darkness. Both the hunters and the hunted […]

This essay will discuss and draw comparisons between William Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark” and Mary Oliver’s poem “The Black Snake”. Our primary objective is to analyze their viewpoints on nature and explore the similarities and differences in their works. It is worth noting that Stafford’s poem adopts a first-person perspective. The poem by […]

1. I do not find the poem shocking because I knew by the title it is about war in some way, and war is very harsh and inhumane. So it is what I expected of the poem. 2. The two bellies the speaker is talking about are the belly of the mother’s womb and the […]

We live in a world where the internet and social media play a big role. There are constantly becoming less and less physical contact and fewer face-to-face relations. This is demonstrated by the fact that we keep in touch with each other over Facebook, shopping takes place over the internet, we keep up with our […]

A Dramatic monologue is a lyric poem in which a single imaginary speaker or a historical personage expresses his thoughts and feelings to an imaginary silent audience. The dramatic monologue as we understand it today “is a lyric poem in which the speaker addresses a silent listener, revealing himself in the context of a dramatic […]

Bruce Dawe’s texts Drifters and Last Seen 12:10am, convey different journeys that offer challenges and insights. Journeys can be defined as an act of travelling from one place to another. The physical journey evident in Drifters places emphasis on the fact that journeys can be forced. The text Last Seen 12:10am depicts that journeys can […]

Poetry is a compact language that expresses complex emotions and thoughts. It contains multiple meanings so one should not only see its literal or obvious components. It is also important to examine its possible perspectives through looking deeper to the rhythm, images, metaphors and the like to also acquire its implied meaning. In order to […]

Men in Chains poem Analysis   How do the words of the poem express the poet’s feelings about the prisoners? The poet uses words and phrases in an attempt to express his sympathetic stirred up feelings towards the men’s suffering through accentuating the appearances of the men and the daunting environment. He does this by […]

One of the most disturbing things in today’s culture is a loss of originality and nationality. People are no longer proud to be Americans and instead of pushing for new heights people follow in the footsteps of others. People today need heir sense of self back and need to start taking pride in what they […]

Edward Abbey’s attitudes toward nature are clearly characterized through his description of the Aravaipa Canyon in New Mexico. Abbey views nature as this magnificent and mysterious concept in life that will forever be unknown, or not entirely comprehensible. His purpose is to show the audience that nature is full of wonder and that there are […]

Bruce Dawe is a famous poet born in 1930. He incorporated similar techniques in his poems ‘War Without End’ and ‘Description of an Idea’. In the ‘War Without End’ the war is metaphorical and represented as the never ending car crashes and accidents on our roads every year whereas in ‘Description of an Idea’ the […]

“The Waste Land” (1922) is one of the most outstanding poems of the 20th century written by the great master Thomas Stearns Eliot. The poem expresses with great power the devastation, decay, futility and despair of the civilization after World War I. In this essay I would like to comment upon the structure as well […]

Elizabeth Jennings was a well-educated English woman who worked in publishing and as a librarian. She devoted much of her poetry to spiritual and emotional topics of a personal nature. She explored suffering, relationships, loneliness and religious faith. In this poem, Elizabeth explores the nature of a marriage relationship in old age. It is very […]