Compare ‘Hitcher’ With One Duffy Poem And Two Pre-1914 Poems That Consider Death Or The Threat Of Death.
...‘The Laboratory’ by Robert Browning and ‘Hitcher’ by Simon Armitage.
Both ‘Hitcher’ and ‘Havisham’ present the threat of death but show no definite killing taking place. In ‘Havisham’, Havisham talks about how she wishes her fiancé, who left her at the altar, dead. Although in ‘Hitcher’ it is debatable that anyone could survive the brutal attack that takes place ‘six times with the krooklok’. Whereas, in ‘Sonne’ and ‘The Laboratory’ a death has actually taken place. In ‘Sonne’ the writer is grieving over his dead son, and in ‘The Laboratory’ the writer has killed the person who was having an affair with her husband.
‘Havisham and ‘The Laboratory’ both use the same theme : relationships. Although, unlike ‘Havisham’, the character in ‘The Laboratory’ does not kill her lover, but the one who is having an affair with him. ‘And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!’, ‘Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon’. The language used in these poems is also different as Browning describes, in detail, the way the woman kills using effective language techniques such as monosyllabic alliterated plosives to portray the aggression to the reader ‘drop dead!’. Whereas in ‘Havisham’ the writer uses descriptive language to describe what the years of hate and anger have done to the woman, using premodification and inanimate objects to show how emotionless the woman is. ‘I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes’.
The language used in the other two poems suggests to the reader the state of mind the writer is in. In ‘On my first Sonne’ the writer uses archaic, direct language to convey the poet’s grief, to create a kind of elegy to his son. Using simple words such as ‘Farewell’, ‘lament’, ‘rage’ and ‘Rest in soft peace’ to show us his anger and upset at his son’s death. But in ‘Hitcher’, the language used gives a more conversational tone, using slang to...
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