How are different types of relationship portrayed in the poems through language, structure and form?
The theme of relationships has always played a major role in our lives. The idea of relationships is a straightforward and effective device used to appeal every audience. The poems, ‘Havisham’, ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad’ by poets Carol Ann Duffy, Robert Browning and John Keats, dealt with the negative emotions that are essential in romantic relationships. In contrast to the three poems, ‘Sonnet 116’, ‘Mother in a Refugee Camp’ and ‘Piano’ by William Shakespeare, DH Lawrence and Chinua Achebe focused on the theme of idealistic love and also a motherly relationship between a mother and her son. All of the poems have similar characteristic and themes and some similar themes that are explored in these poems are the conflict between lovers and that love can cause a person to be vulnerable and bring pain to them. This essay will discuss various poems about different types of relationships. Particularly, it will show how poets use structure, sound and language to convey their ideas about relationships.
DH Lawrence’s ‘Piano’ is a poem full of imagery and specific details, the poem represents a nostalgic moment for an adult to remember the special time with his mother in his childhood. The scene where the speaker is sitting somewhere with his lover singing to him brings him back his childhood memories. “Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me”, the tone of this phrase is intimate and yearning. The word ‘softly’ is an adverb that adds to a gentle and relaxing atmosphere. In the beginning of the poem, Lawrence does not name his mother but instead he says, ‘ a woman’ which makes his memory seems more distant. The metaphor, “Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see” is to show that Lawrence compared the view of the landscape to a ‘flood’ of his memories. Sounds of the piano is shown through onomatopoeia in the phrase, “in...