Poetry Comparison Essay

The Position of Humans in Nature

Cherry trees bloom white in spring and are piled with snow in winter. A cool, dark forest looms before a traveller and beckons to him like a siren on land. In a bright meadow, a lamb and a child converse and praise the Lord’s creation. The trees, animals, and humans all exist together and all are connected. It’s a connection that many poets have written and rhymed about across and throughout time. In the poems “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, “Loveliest of Trees” by A E Housman and “The Lamb” by William Blake, the authors, with their use of diction, rhyme and mood, all developed a clear and substantial theme thereby reinforcing their purpose of demonstrating the different ways that human

E. Housman, William Blake’s “The Lamb” focuses strongly on developing the mood and the first person point of view in order to reveal his theme of the simplicity of faith and its presence in all aspects of the world. He communicates to the reader the limited viewpoint of a faithful child and effectively creates a buoyantly light and innocent mood that reflects the simplicity of faith that Blake wants his readers to perceive. In the second stanza, the speaker speaks to the lamb about the connection between them and Jesus saying: “I a child, and thou a lamb/ We are called by his name” (Arp and Johnson 793). Using the mood that he creates with the innocent voice of the speaker, Blake shows how, in its simplest form, faith connects humans and nature and gives people a clear position in the world in relation to nature and God. The simplicity of the theme strengthens the innocence of the message that Blake effectively conveys. The poet reiterates strongly throughout the poem, using simple sentences and light language, the world of the child “in which lambs, children, and the Christ child are woven together into a trinity of innocence” (Deatrick

E. Housman, and William Blake, wrote poems with strong and compelling themes. They all focused on a human’s relationship with nature, but each in their own way; one focusing on a human stuck between nature and society, another on the appreciation of nature in the realization of mortality and the third focusing on the connection between all beings and God. The poets strengthened the messages they wanted to convey and with the use of various devices, such as diction, mood, and repetition they were able to gracefully communicate their theme and purpose of demonstrating the different ways that human beings interact with and develop a perspective on the nature in the world that they live in. They focused their literary devices strongly on nature and in this way, told their own truths about the way that human beings fit into the world that the poets themselves observed. Whether describing trees, forests, or lambs, each poet expertly utilized language in order to say something about humans and their behaviour, beliefs or their