Compare How Women Are Presented in 4 of the Poems You Have Studied

Compare how women are presented in 4 of the poems you have studied. To do this compare “Mother…

” by Simon Armitage and 3 other poems, one by Duffy and two from the pre 1914 bank. All 4 poems ( Mother, Anne Hathaway, Sonnet 130 and song of the old mother) are all linked to each other all by using different techniques of language to present women and to create some story in there poem. Mother (written by Simon Armitage), the woman (the mother) in the poem is presented in a form of imagery.

Armitage writes as though he is the son and uses this pattern of imagery to talk about the mother and the feelings they both have at that point in life and also about what they want with their relationship with each other. The poem Mother is about the son who is trying to move on with his life, taking the next step away from home by doing up another house. He is getting older and therefore does not need his mother in his life.

However, the mother finds it hard to take in this news and struggles to let go of her son.

All authors use some technique of language to draw us into the poem and emphasise the feelings of the women in each of the 4 poems. Armitage shows the feelings of the mother and son by describing what they are doing to the house (using imagery). ‘You at the zero end, me with the spool of tape, recording length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling years between us. Anchor.

Kite. ‘ Here Armitage describes the mother and son’s relationship.

He says that the mother is at the zero end and is therefore not moving and staying where she is, as for the son has the spool of tape is his hand and is moving away from the mother to measure the length. Armitage cleverly uses imagery here and suggesting that by the son moving further and further away with the spool of tape from the zero end, it shows that he is growing up and moving further and further away from his mother while she stays put (at the zero end). In the Anne Hathaway poem, the imagery technique is also used a lot as well.

Armitage goes on to using a lot of comers and listing what the son is doing with the tape measure – ‘recording length, reporting metres, .

.. ‘ he makes this long sentence to try n suggest that the years between the son and the mother runs on continuously like the tape measure, and the gap is increasing more and more. In the poem Anne Hathaway (written by Carol Ann Duffy) also has this technique put in to it. Duffy uses the same skill as Armitage by making the poem run on and be continuous by listing and using a lot of comers and only few full stops.

This time the poem is written by the woman. She talks about her love life with Shakespeare and describes it to us using imagery as well. ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed a page beneath his writer’s hands. ‘ She is suggesting the bed sheet is like the numerous sheets of paper Shakespeare wrote his poems on and that the sex they had together on the bed sheets was like a poem Shakespeare would write on a sheet of paper. Sonnet 130 (written by the pre-1914 poetry bank) also has imagery as one of its techniques in the poem.

Shakespeare writes the poem about his women but does not come across romantic as first. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; coral is far more red than her lips’ red. If snow be white; why then her breasts be done; if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. ‘ It seems to look like Shakespeare is insulting his woman however he is insulting other poets who talk about their women in a way which is not literal or likely to be true. It is romantic because although he is saying his woman is not the best looking of them all he is saying he loves her just the way she is.

He does not say this directly but shows it through imagery. Shakespeare also makes this poem have a rhythm. He does this by rhyming every other line (AB). This makes the poem sound a bit lighter than it has to be and therefore sounds less mean towards his woman and a bit petty towards the other poets. This technique of rhythm is also used in Song of the old mother (also written by the pre-1914 bank). It is also rhythmic because it rhymes (AA couplets).

This is to give the poem a beat so it is interesting to read.

It is also used so it can emphasise the verbs rhyming together at the end of each line so we can realise how hard she’s working. She is complaining by saying all the work she does. The poem is written in 1st person and none of the other poems i have written about do this. Mother, Anne Hathaway and Sonnet all use imagery in their poems to describe to us either how people are feeling or what they are thinking or what is happening or has happened. Sonnet and The song of the old mother both have rhythm in their poems.

All four poems present women in similar techniques making them all easy to compare.