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Comparison
In the exam, you will be required to write about several poems, some pre-1914 and some post-1914. To which poems would you compare Catrin? There will be a number of ways in which the poems can be compared, and you may well be able to think of ones which we have not!
Comparisons with other poems
| Poet and poem | What to look for in your comparison |
|---|---|
| Heaney: Storm on the Island | Both poems explore the more dangerous aspects of water, Clarke focusing on its power to suck us in and drown us, Heaney on its potential for violent destructiveness during a storm. Clarke's poem uses the lake to symbolise the shifting quality of memory, while Heaney's poem is more purely descriptive. |
| Whitman: Patrolling Barnegat | Again, both poems deal with the threatening aspects of water; both from the writer's personal experience. And both poems contain a hint of the supernatural - Clarke using fairy story references, Whitman using more religious imagery [imagery: Vivid 'word pictures' used by a writer to conjure up a mental image of something. ] (savage trinity, demoniac laughter to describe his storm. |
| Clare: Sonnet | Both poems contain descriptions of water, but for Clare the water is beautiful and clear with none of the threat or murkiness of Clarke's lake. Is this difference reflected in the differing structures of the poems - the regular form and rhyme [rhyme: In poetry, the use of words which have the same or a similar sound - eg 'flow' and 'bow' - to form a pattern of sound. ] scheme of Sonnet expressing Clare's clarity and simplicity, while Clarke's uncertainty comes through in the half-rhymes and loose stanza structurestructure: The way a text is built and shaped. Chapters, plot, acts and scenes, stanzas, narrative, verse-form, rhyme and rhythm - all these (and many more) are aspects of structure. of her poem? |
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