How do Thomas and Lewis write about the relationship between humans and specific places?
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Course
AS Unit 2 - Poetry Post-1900
Institution
WJEC
Comparative Essay on the theme of humans in association to specific places. This essay is a reponse to a typical question on the poetry paper. I recieved full marks for this essay.
How do Thomas and Lewis write about the relationship between humans and specific places?
The relationship between humans and specific places can be seen in Lewis’ ‘The Rhondda’ and Thomas’
‘The Combe’ who both use Yonic landscapes to metaphorically suggest the violation of a femininised
nature committed by man. The destructive effects on the humans who participate in violence are
suggested through both the poem’s absence of life through the pollution of the overtaking industry;
they actively control the destruction of these landscapes but are passive to the ways the destruction
controls them.
Thomas’ foregrounded use of the adjective “dark” to describe the combe suggests to us that this
landscape cannot and never will be able to change. The landscape is personified as having a “mouth”
that is “stopped by bramble, thorn and briar”, these sharp and dangerous parts of nature acting as a gag
for the valley in that it cannot cry out for help. Thomas presents the valley as a prisoner to our
endeavours; our exploitation of the landscape has left it with nothing that can be used for us anymore
since we “killed the badger there”. The use of an animal that we typically associate with English
nationality being slaughtered by the English themselves literally suggests nature’s areas of darkness as
well as metaphorically human nature’s areas of darkness. The imagery of a place of beauty and fertility
being violently destroyed is deliberate of Thomas as he is highlighting that through the destruction of
other life, we bring about the end of all life. Thomas deep love for nature resulted in him believing we all
should live equally among it, describing himself as “an inhabitant of the earth” and eliminating any
implication that he was above it hierarchically. Our propensity for war will ultimately lead to all life being
“shut out” and cast to darkness; the “ancient” valley being a victim to our destructive tendencies
resembling one of many ‘rape[s] of the earth’.
Whilst Thomas shows the destruction of nature by humans, Lewis’ ‘The Rhondda’ shows how the
destruction of nature leads to the destruction of humans. The feminised landscape in this poem
symbolised by the Greek goddess ‘Circe’, who in The Odyssey was known for turning Odysseus’ men into
swine for their acts towards nature. We see this similar act when she “sucks husbands out of sleep”,
presenting the men as passive to their labours. Their eyes and hands being taken by Circe as “profit” for
the work resemble the dangers the men put themselves in by working in the mines, with Circe being
seen as taking revenge on the men for their violations of the landscape. The children who play in the
“dirty rapids” foreshadows how their futures have been polluted, as Thomas had emphasised in his
poem, the men’s destruction of other life has led to the destruction of their own life (their children’s
lives). Alongside this, the future destruction is foreshadowed in the harsh consonant sounds in “hum of
shaft wheel, whirr and clamour”, the iambic pentameter sounding similar to the witches’ spell in
Macbeth that ultimately leads to his tragic downfall. The poem may be alluding to the paradox of
Macbeth in that by killing Duncan, he seals his own fate. Thus, both poems suggest that by humans
destroying nature for our own endeavours, we are destroying ourselves and our world, as shown by the
dust of the mining that “rings the scruffy willows” in Lewis’ poem as well Thomas’ poem’s abandoned
valley that “none one scrambles over”.
Thomas’ ‘Home’ and Lewis’ ‘The Mountain Over Aberdare’ depict the relationship between humans and
landscapes and a way that is more personal to both writers as they’re written from first-person
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