Homecoming And Beach Burial Analysis

Within the poetry I have studied throughout the year, I have found that most poems show feelings of distress, however, acceptance is also present. Bruce Dawe and Kenneth Slessor successfully portray the distress of war in their poems, whereas Sylvia Plath and Wilfred Owen show this feeling through different examples of suffering. Rudyard Kipling and Maya Angelou are two poets who I believed showed their readers how to accept things in life, whether you can influence them or not. These different poems show that many feelings can be portrayed through literature.
Bruce Dawe and Kenneth Slessor both explore the theme of death in their poems Homecoming and Beach Burial, which both portray feelings of distress. In Homecoming, Dawe talks about the …show more content…
Although they have different themes, the tone in which they use is very similar. Insomniac portrays the suffering that those with insomnia endure, which is supported through the use of metaphors. Plath describes “his head [to be] a little interior of grey mirrors” which allows the reader to picture the intense thoughts that goes through someone’s head when they are unable to sleep. Owen uses the same technique to allow the reader to imagine the slow death of soldiers during the harsh winter. The personified “pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for [their] faces” allow the readers to imagine the snowflakes falling onto their faces. This imagery describes how as the snowflakes fall, they are reaching out to grasp the men’s faces, which would make their faces numb due to the low temperatures. In comparison, Insomniac uses sensual references to portray how senses are heightened at night when one cannot sleep. This also gives the idea of how lying awake at night seems like forever. This is similar to the idea of nothing happening which is presented in Exposure. Moreover, both Plath and Owen uncover the reality of inability to sleep and death at war in a comparable distressful