poem comparison essay help

poem comparison essay help

A Comparative Analysis of Poetic Works: Unveiling the Themes, Techniques, and Cultural Significance

1. Introduction to Poem Comparison Essays

A poem comparison essay is basically a response to one or two poems that you have studied and are put together as a topic for an essay. Poem comparison essays are generally based on two parts: describing the theme and techniques used in the literary work, and deciding whether it’s a formalistic or traditional essay based on which literary techniques are used in the work. A poem itself can contain both these literary aspects, but your essay must talk about one and how it can be compared to the other to make a poem comparison essay.

To be able to write a poem comparison essay, you will first need to carefully read both poems. It will also be a good idea to read a little about the poets themselves so you can understand what their poems are about. The next step that you need to take includes identifying the points or themes in both poems that you will discuss in your essay. Now you need to brainstorm your thoughts and begin organizing your thoughts. Look for any literary techniques that the poets used, such as irony, the use of imagery, point of view, and even the different tones they used (are they happy, sad, mocking?). In your essay, your thoughts are put together in a coherent and logical way. Is it possible to do a traditional essay that doesn’t use any of these literary techniques? What about a formalistic essay that uses only these techniques when writing poetry? The strength of your essay is in the analysis and the themes, techniques, and culture or time portrayed in the poem need to be unveiled. In this essay, the structure will be similar for both poems, and the discussion may be on one poem first and then move on to the second one. In the first paragraph, the background of the poem, time written, author, and theme must be discussed. In the second paragraph, the structure and form of the poem should be introduced: the style used, language, rhythm, tone, and the poetic devices.

2. Analytical Framework: Identifying Themes and Techniques

Using an analytical framework, we hereby list the themes and techniques that would be analyzed across the three poetic works. Traditional poetry itself, as exemplified by the Gothic “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819), its Chinese parallel “The Lady of the Feng Boat Capture” zaju.223 “A Journey Into the Moon Palace” (云汉台) by the poet Yao Naixing (b. 1958), and the poem “The Lady of the Spring Palace” (春宫秋楼), part of a 2009 collection of poetry bearing the same title by the Chinese poet Song Junkoi (b. 1962), share conventional concerns including love, illness, and the shortness of life. However, the thematic of suffering is combined differently, and the narrative of the latter two is not linear in a Western sense (Gothic narratives, as Elaine Scarry has noted, are typically static). Nor, across poems, is the breach of social propriety in representing male-female love the same. As for form and techniques, the two Chinese narratives were set to music and to a form of poetry in which the ideal of fidelity involves a subtlety of subtle response. I call this music poetry.

Methodology: How would we arrive at these themes and techniques across quite different works? Our methodology will be a combination of New Historicist and close reading (analyzing the artistic techniques used by Son Jinkoi and Yao Nainxong and the ideological content of those techniques). A 16th and 17th-century genre of love songs and singing games, zaju were party music accompanied by dancing and drinking. Standards of cultural decorum praised, from the 11th century onward, a lovable poetry grounded in historical fact and music whose beauty lay in “the music hidden in sounds which reach the ear, [where] harmony is on the surface, [and] pleasure is on the ear (Wei).” The combination of pleasure and a veiled response of mind and heart creates a fugitive beauty also elusive of standard scholarly exegesis.

3. Case Studies: Contrasting Two Poems

Contrast: Surrender by Primo Levi/Futility by Wilfred Owen

With Surrender, we witness a triplication of key motifs from the universe of Levi’s work: the theme of time, the reference to a Jewish itinerancy, and the quest for hope. Verbally and semantically, everything expresses, in fact, a tragic condition, static or inert, while calling for change. Here lies the fundamental contradiction that supports, as we have seen, the work of this chemist-writer.

This sort of conclusion by antithesis, subsumed to pain’s assertion, introduces the possibility of a twofold, contrasting reservation. At the strictly linguistic level, by using a title that may recall those of two more recent poems, Levi puns on a word that, in Italian, can be synonymous with “delivery” or “surrender” as well as “put down” or “resignation”. The lines are riddled with instrumental, deictic as well as strictly vocabulary-based repetitions, intermediation “vests” and – series of – “neither X nor Y” comparisons. Guided by a basic binary logic, they convey Bierce-like, towards the end, a humorously resolute saying “after writing it, what is missing is to rhyme it”. The piece is a sonnet, as has been partially reconstructed from Levi’s diary.

Tone, metaphors, perspective, and so on: though there are details that signal the inclusion of politics in Lampedusa’s focalization, the perspective of The Leopard is, by definition, ethnocentric. In the following paragraphs, I will seek to prove that the two poems, while apparently talking of an area with deep-seated social differences – kids in a city of Eastern Russia for the former, soldiers in France, a city of Royal Bengal soldiers – many, on the other hand, from the excluded areas of Bihar, the still rural areas surrounding the city of Minsk; while apparently facing different issues – the disintegration of an inquisitive couple for the poem of Dostoevskian fate, in which the word “love” is also used, albeit prudently, to describe what has been broken and the crux made/appears of the poet sold out by a sexist world the former, and the dehumanization of war bringing about the solitary pain of loss, a familial landscape, the poet soldier separated from his mates by a sudden nuclear blast of excessive intimacy, here are, in fact, deeply alike in many respects – in their techniques, themes, and field of social criticism (which also harbors a not-so-obscure disturbing appeal, an appeal which ultimately consists of the fact that the issues, although strictly confined, thus apparently not implicating me, do implicate me).

4. Cultural and Historical Contexts: Impact on Poetic Interpretation

Many writers churn out verses and find inspiration, or themes, in subjects, eras, and methods that are used by other authors over the years. To understand fully what poets explore, it is valuable to see their individual projects in historical and cultural contexts. As readers open the poems and essays in this capstone, the comparisons direct attention to these themes, techniques, and questions of cultural identity – either explicitly or implicitly – and ask that we consider their subjects in fresh and personal ways. Authored over two centuries and composed in otherwise unique historical conditions of radical cultural shift and counter-reaction or prolonged conflict, the poems reveal themselves to the readers as constructive works of memory concerning questions of status, adaptation, and interpretation, and as means to read works from the past with poems from the present. In doing so, the poems themselves can be interpreted from the perspective of various transcultural shifts caused by global networks, migration, acquisitive journeys and cultural contact, and, as a result, engage with shifting and alternative notions of cultural community and self.

Classical Persian literature is primarily based on a long and continuous process of restoration, imitation, adaptation, and extension in all poetic genres. Keywords such as ‘guha, arth, muzun, tafaqur, mani, and kf’yi’ influences can be translated as “understanding,” “meaning,” “depth,” “reflection,” “content,” and “logical unifications.” This frames unifying ideological and poetic techniques comprising codified signifying conventions that become “weltanschuungen,” or worldviews. Such translators-interpreters direct readers to concentrate on inner meanings, not formal factors, since romanticized, mystical-universal absolutes are conveyed through surrounding synecdoches, metalepses, and metaphor.

5. Conclusion and Implications for Literary Studies

The Spider and the Fly by Mary Howitt manages to bring all of the differing concepts, narrative angles, and emotional implications that have been previously discussed to a single point in which the poem refuses to move beyond the inexorable stasis of finality which it presents. Whilst Oppenheim’s work shifts through various tendrils of sudden but tranquil, creeping realization, Howitt captures the instant of dismay so blithely promised in his narrative pausing. As a result, it crystallizes the predatory examination so often deferred in the parallel writings illustrating the disembodied gaze.

More broadly, these conclusions suggest that the question of which of the two works in question has more in common with the liminal, predatory narrative gaze as a liminal position and point of narrative authority is essentially an imponderable one. Each work demonstrates line by line that these two functions of literary texts are seemingly impossible to traverse without shifting into divergent modes of narrative authority. Viewed in these terms, the apparent ambiguity of each work’s liminal capacity to speak for, with, or from the gaze may not even be a contradiction; rather it may be seen as a near-precise reframing of what it means to have a function within a narrative. In each instance, the liminal gazer is positioned in the text as a threshold over which any further movement can only seem to offer a contradictory direction of thought which the flow of the text refuses to follow. Future studies of representational liminality should continue to utilize such comparative work for the crafting of more exact arguments in liminal studies.