Owen Sheers Skirrid Hill Exemplar Essays
How Owen Sheers presents coming of age in Border Country Essay
His view of nature in this poem is centered on death and the cyclical nature of life, in great contrast to previous poems which explored what it feels like to be a man. This is just a sample from a fellow student. Sorry, copying is not allowed on our website. We will occasionally send you account related emails.
Want us to write one just for you? Not so evil after all: Skilled with Words, for Better or Worse: Nothing and No situation can last forever Essay. White Teeth and Autobiography of My Mother: Comparing the Concepts of Origin Essay. The Mere and the Mead-Hall Essay. As You Like It Essays. The Little Prince Essays. Haven't found the right essay? Professional writers and researchers. Sources and citation are provided. The essence of this poem is to evoke the natural world using quintessentially human imagery.
As we progress from Spring to Winter, we are given increasingly negative human images to describe the natural world. The likening of bees pollinating and the act of cunnilingus is a crude one and gives a sense of the lustful, bacchanalian side to human nature. Creates the thematic link that both webs and fingerprints are unique patterns, and arguably beautiful things.
However, fingerprints also carry the connotation of criminality. With this final haiku we have the thematic key to the poem. The nests are there to remind us of the nesting machine guns in Mametz Wood which represent humanity at its very worst. He reminds us that birds change their environment and build nests in trees, and nature eventually thwarts their efforts. If humans are simply doing what birds do on a different scale, then maybe our tendency to manufacture and change our environment is a natural thing.
A quick note on Christopher Logue — from whom the epigraph is taken. By referring to Logue, Sheers is drawing our attention to a type of modernisation that involves paying respect to great elements of the past and revitalising them with modern means. The tone is set very early on that, whilst many will fight to preserve the ways of the past in order to keep their country in the state it once was, man has always thrived on innovation.
Sheers is looking at Wales from the distant perspective of a speeding train, from behind glass, and he speculates that the Welsh people are unable to see how they appear to the rest of the world. This tension is further explored by conflicting the motorway a symbol of progress and linking all of Britain together, with the flag, a symbol of traditional identity.
Quick history lesson — Ebbw Vale steelworks was established during the industrial revolution in and became one of the most important steel manufacturers in Europe. Because of its place in the bottom of a valley, the steel plant managed to survive bombardment during the Second World War. It was closed down in and demolished in as a result of the decline in steel and coal production. This is one of the few examples in the collection where the title forms part of the poem itself. The steelworks at Ebbw Vale represents the pride and importance once held by Wales as an ideal site for manufacturing goods.
The suggestion seems to be here that the men, now they can no longer take pride in their country, have started to take pride in their physical appearance and go about their manual tasks in the name of vanity rather than productivity. The most famous poets in the group were John Donne and Andrew Marvell, and they liked to write witty, inventive extended metaphors and similes. He suggests that because their blood has been mingled inside the flea, then they are practically married and may as well have sex. When you are dealing with a poem in which a writer is taking great pains to draw comparisons between two things often from the natural world and the human world, almost to the point of exhaustion, then this is called a metaphysical conceit.
As you may know from Greek mythology, Sirens were the evil women with beautiful singing voices who would lure sailors to their death on the rocks with their song. In this sense, the poet is just as trapped as his lover in this situation — for whilst she is caged, he is trapped by the beauty of her song. As this poem is an extended metaphor, then our only way to truly understand it is to see everything in it as a symbol.
The cage becomes a situation which keeps the lovers from being entirely together, yet they are able to interact. Perhaps they have agreed to be friends. The bird may think that he is free, but he is just trapped in a different way. The fact that the metaphor between birds and people does not entirely work may be an indication that Sheers does not believe that the natural world and the world of humans is entirely comparable. The word has two main readings in the poem. In this Biblical story we have a man and woman lost their innocence and feel the need to cover themselves up with leaves.
The baring this has on the poem is that the act of sex between the man and the woman held them in a moment of innocence and purity, but after the act they begin to regain their modesty and feel the urge to cover up. By choosing an image from Ancient Egypt, Sheers ties back into the idea of the timelessness. Notice too how telephone wires are a recurring image in this collection.
A sign of the shrinking world and the onset of global communication, causing a homogenous society where everyone is the same. Robert Capa is a famous Hungarian photographer of war, and is renowned for having photographed five separate wars. The particular set of photographs being referred to in this poem are the ones taken during the D-Day landings of WWII. As is depicted in the poem, a worker at Life magazine accidentally destroyed almost all of the negatives from this set of photographs, save for seven.
The seven which survived are characterised by their blurriness and frantic appearance. As you are probably aware, poetry flourished during the First World War. Literary figures such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are revered to this day as some of the most important sources when studying the nature of trench warfare.
Interestingly, there was not such a ubiquitous uptake of poetry in the Second World War, which can be attributed to many factors. The comment he therefore appears to be making is that group mentality is unavoidable and human beings cannot help but act with a collective consciousness in desperate situations. This simultaneous tension and mutual support between Britain and USA is something that recurs in this collection later.
This is yet another poem which, superficially, stands out as being different from others in this collection due to its incongruent subject matter. The fact that Sheers includes poems such as this is a strong indication that this is not a simple book extolling the virtues of old-Wales and mourning the gradual spread of capitalism across the country. The aim of the organisation was to improve conditions for those who had served in the Zimbabwean army by putting pressure on the President, Robert Mugabe.
This poem is very much concerned with the type of people who find attraction and beauty in the realm of artificial things. By extension, every emotion or gesture made by Hunzvi has been a conscious choice, a role play perhaps, and that he is not capably of having a genuine emotional engagement with anything. Of course, the flipside of this is that, even though he may always be in control of his emotions, he is incapable of innocent happiness. The comparison we may therefore make is that there is sometimes a convergence between the real and the contrived, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the natural and the man-made.
The title of this poem aligns with the musicality of much of the imagery in this collection. Music and poetry are often very closely linked, and so this sequence here encourages us to make comparisons between the two. Most noticeably perhaps, the different stanza lengths may well be interpreted as different time signatures. We have just read a poem about how unhealthy it is to treat life like a movie and how it is the mark of superficial, bad people.
It is ironic then that the speaker begins to describe his own life like notes from a screenplay — we may then see this as a superficial pairing of the poet with his lover. The musicality of this image also ties in with the title and various other instances of musical importance in the collection. It is interesting that Sheers moves from triplets to couplets in these next to sections. The implication may be that the couple are once again in-sync and working as a couple.
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It is also one of the only moments in the collection where a man and woman are naked and physically close for a purpose other than sexual gratification. We may see this as being the one instance of true intimacy between the lovers in this collection, although it is slightly jarred by the way that the man has his back to the woman. We might see this as a coming together of the two disciplines, or we may simply see it as a symbol for how these two people could never be happy as they see the world in entirely different ways — her as an artist and he as a writer.
The basic idea is that human beings can only learn from experiences and engagement with the world around them. The implication here would be that physical intimacy is the only way of being assured of our own existence and role in the universe, which is why we are so predisposed to enter into relationships, even bad ones. Again, we have a description of a back… there is another one of these in the next poem in the way Sheers describes a mountain.
But not before we have a single isolated line to indicate that things have gone back to how they were and the couple are no longer together. The title, as is often the case, has a variety of meanings. Telephones are a symbol of technology and also a sign of people communicating whilst being a very large distance apart.
If we compare this to the lovers laying naked, side by side, but facing away from each other in the opening of the poem, we get the sense that they have now drifted further and further apart until the emotional line that held them together has completely broken. The American major is shown as an arrogant figure who ignores all prior warning from maps and farmers that they are about to set up camp in a dangerous, flood-prone, area.
In the context of the world Owen Sheers was living in, I think we can draw a few obvious parallels. Firstly, we have the invasion of Iraq, a conflict which saw the deaths of many Americans who were marched into a situation under false pretences and were killed in their thousands as a result. The other strong parallel here is the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina an event which lead to over a thousand deaths and left the City of New Orleans flooded.
The final lines seem to echo so many of the images shown from the City of New Orleans at that time:. The happiness may well come from the reminder that ultimately nature will always overpower the strength of men, perhaps belittling the fears they have of war and the men on the opposing side. The happiness might also be derived from the fact that their arrogant major has been unequivocally proven wrong, and that it is worth all levels of hardship and inconvenience for the sake of defrauding an incompetent leader as an idiot.
In the case of Hurricane Katrina, this is exactly what happened, as it showed the president at the time, George Bush, in a particularly bad light. It is no accident that Sheers follows up a poem about American arrogance with a poem which makes mention of oil.
The irony here is that Sheers is not giving us simply episodes of nostalgia for a simpler, more natural time. Whilst the people of Wales may yearn for a time in the past, the golden-age that they yearn for is one entirely based on the industrial revolution, quarries and mining. Whilst this era may have created extra jobs for the Welsh, it was also a time of terrible living conditions founded on ruthless innovation and decisions based on business models. Notice how the quatrains of this poem are interrupted by three couplets. The couplets could be a visual indication of the blades of slate that are depicted, or could be seen as a symbol of the crumble and break-up of Welsh industry.
The mention of bone-marrow also subliminally put the reader in mind of cancer — an important thing to consider when dealing with the next poem. Perhaps the first thing you thought of was the internet bookshop when you saw the word. Sheers is surely familiar with the website, and if you go to the page for his debut collection, The Blue Book , you will see some particularly scathing reviews of his work.
Perhaps Sheers would describe the public insult of his work by jealous fellow poets as being a painful experience that has made him stronger in the long run. It is also important to our understanding of this poem that in the Amazon rainforest, some of the tribeswomen will have one of their breasts removed to improve their ability to use a bow and arrow in hunting. This practice is specifically referred to in the final line of the poem — the missing breast is used as a symbol of strength rather than vulnerability.
This connotation is obviously important to the depiction of the strong, female figure who emerges by the end of this poem. As you will have noticed, the structure of this longer poem is unique in the collection.
Why has Sheers made this choice? However, beneath the defences of her clothes, beneath her very skin, lies a sign of something that is set to undo her life. By doing this he gives us a sense of the reluctance to fully come to terms with our own mortality. Fireworks have become a symbol in this collection for putting on a front and displaying a sort of contrived beauty.
The woman in this poem now feels strong enough to reclaim her femininity and rejoin the world of playing roles. In this sense, human beings are like a cancer to the natural world. There is no simple moral stance taken by Sheers on whether it is right to defy nature with artificial means — the equilibrium between man and nature is a complex balance in this collection. One becomes a positive person by being positive towards others.
It seems as though Sheers draws a clear distinction between male magic and female magic in this collection — male magic is an instinctive thing that involves doing impressive things subconsciously. Female magic is more of a contrived way of creating the illusion of attractiveness.
In her review of his last collection, Zoe Brigley suggested that Sheers was following in a long line of misogynistic Welsh poets. So, a quick note on the title. The Superstition Mountains are to be found in Arizona. Visually they look a bit similar to Skirrid Hill, which creates a visual link between USA and Wales in the collection.
How Owen Sheers presents coming of age in Border Country Essay Example | Graduateway
There is also a degree of mythology surrounding the mountains; some Native American tribes believe that there is a hole leading into the underworld somewhere in the mountains. Again — this creates a link between Wales and USA, encourages us to see more similarities between the two places other than the spread of superficial culture.
The song itself is about some of the negative things that go on in American suburbs such as shootings, teenage pregnancy, elderly people not given the care they need in their later years and the anaesthetisation of youth through television.
By quoting from a modern rock song, Sheers is also showing us that his collection is nor simply influenced by the past and what has come before him in the world of literature, but what is going on in the world around him now. Quick facts … this poem is set in Sun City West. When the census was taken in the year , they found that there was nobody under the age of 18 living in the town and Make of this information what you will!
There is a tension between tradition and a movement into the modern world. By having Private Detectives in a poem which begins with a picket fence and a Mustang two symbols of an innocent, golden age in America we get the sense that nothing is what it seems and, behind closed doors, nobody plays the same roles that they do out in the open. A strong symbol of this is that the speaker is sat reading a poem by Robert Lowell whilst he waits for the person that he is spying on.
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I have taken the liberty of giving you the full copy of the Lowell poem that is quoted in italics in this poem as part of the appendix I know, what a nice guy. What you should know about Robert Lowell is that he was known as a confessional poet , and became famous for being one of the earliest respected writers to write very honestly and often very uncomfortably about his most intimate details and darkest thoughts.
This form of poetry would soon be made even more famous by Sylvia Plath. This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge. Quoting heavily from other writers Sheers does this at various points throughout the collection. Sun City West could be described as an aging community past its prime in a way that we can compare to the Steelworks, the Hill Fort, the Landmark or any other examples of things that we can see wasting away over time.
Remember our old friend T. Eliot from the epigraph? Well, he is going to be a great help in understanding what is going on in this poem.
Bridging the gap between A-level and undergraduate poetry teaching
It begins with Sheers and his grandfather being separate at work with Sheers observing him but it ends in a typical Sheers style of bringing them close together. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. An analysis of the novel The Help, its audio version and the movie. February 2, at Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email required Address never made public.