How is death presented in the six poems ?
The theme of death is apparent in all of the poems. Some are natural deaths, other deaths of planned or caused. The natural deaths are unavoidable whereas the other deaths are intentional. This creates a dissimilarity between some of the poems and how death is presented.
Long Distance is about the pain of remembering someone who has died naturally. The poem describes the narrator’s father’s failure to come to terms with the death of his wife. Although she has been dead for two years he still renews her bus pass and warms her slippers. His son cannot understand this behaviour, but the final stanza reveals that now that both his parents are dead, and despite how he felt earlier, he still keeps their phone numbers in his “new black leather phone book.” The word “new” tells us that... The language that Tony Harrison uses is very normal and gets to the point. For example, he “kept her slippers warming” and “made her hot water bottles” shows that he is continuing to behave as if his wife is still alive.The warmth from the first two images could be a metaphor for love as heat. The poet uses strong emotive language such as “raw love “ to describe how his father felt towards his mother. His father obviously
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He turns to killing as a way of releasing his creativity and boredom “I am going to play God”. This quote also shows that he thinks he has no control of his life and wants to take it back. The person in the poem is having psychotic thoughts and is starting to lose his sanity due to the lack of purpose in his life “I am going to kill something” this means that he is being reckless. Education for leisure is different to the other poems because the death in it is intentional and not by natural