Contrast the views of childhood in 3 poems ("My parents kept me from children who were rough", "Pian", "Half past two")

Essay by RedDevil April 2006

download word file, 11 pages 5.0

Downloaded 48 times

The Poems that deal with childhood reflect in a stylish lively way how children feel towards matters and experience in their first stage of life. Different poets treated this subject and their feelings translated towards the reader experiences or moments they lived which left a deep impact on their souls and lives.

The three poems that we are dealing with illustrate how each poet has a different point of view despite the similarities we find in the themes. Now these poems portray childhood from sad and happy memories. The poets express their feelings toward their childhood. As I was reading the poems I came across different emotions of nostalgias in "piano" by Lawrence, indignation in "half past two" by Fanthorpe, bitterness and oppression in "My parents kept me from children who were rough".

'Half past two' is a poem in which Fanthorpe describes how a young child is given detention for an unspecified misdemeanor and is forgotten by his teacher.

Fanthorpe draws his experience with his teacher to describe the scene as seen through the child's eyes.

The title of the poem tells me a lot of information even before I read the poem: A boy is told to stay until "half past two" but this has no-meaning to him because he has no concept of "time". The boy can not tell time but yet he divides the day up into familiar recognizable units, as in "schooltime", "lunchtime", "hometime".

The tone in half past two varies from anger, bitterness, fear and indignation.

In the first stanza Fanthorpe includes the first of his markers of the day, which the boy recognizes as a time in the day. This is set out as a "compound word": "schooltime". Whereas the words (I forgot what it was) and the use of parenthesis (brackets) show...