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Edexcel Contemporary poems. Effects and 6'oclock
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Effects and When six o'clock and another day has passedCompare the methods both poets use to explore emotional responses to birth and death
In both ‘Effects’ by Alan Jenkins and ‘When Six O’clock Comes and Another Day Has
Passed’ by Kathyrn Simmonds, the poets use their free verse to convey the natural
dependence that people have on each other as a form of an intense emotional response to
birth and death. However, In ‘Effects’, as an emotional response to death, the speaker
conveys a regretful, longing to return to the moments when they were dependent on their
mother was alive and functioning, whereas in ‘When Six O’Clock Comes and Another Day
Has Passed’, the poet has used the emotion of elation to highlight the overwhelming nature
of birth, and the codependency of the relationship between a parent and the newborn baby.
Looking first to the titles of each poem, in ‘Effects’, Jenkin’s informative title contains
connotations of impacts and development, indicating that the deathly change in the
speaker’s life has had a large impact on them. This is seen through the double f sound in the
word ‘effects’, which prolongs the word, suggesting that the death of the speaker's mother
and the grief that comes with it has a long lasting effect on them. However, juxtaposingly, in
‘‘When Six O’clock comes and Another Day Has Passed’, the poet emphasises how time is
moving quickly since birth, symbolic of the exciting nature of new parenthood.
Both poets use the method of structure to emphasise the intensity of emotion as a response
to birth and death. In both poems, the poets use one stanza to demonstrate the idea of the
overwhelming nature of the human condition. The structure of ‘When Six O’clock comes and
Another Day Has Passed’ is a significant method in portraying an emotional response to
birth; the poem is short and brief, containing the rushed thrill of raising a child. In the second
line of the poem, ‘When the sun has risen and set over the same dishes and the predicted
weather is white cloud’, the poet uses enjambment to express how time seems to move
rapidly, and the language used here is blunt, and non descriptive, expressing the excitement
the speaker feels about the birth of their baby. However, ‘Effects’ uses an overwhelmingly
long dense structure to display a flow of emotions, demonstrating how time doesn’t feel like it
is moving when you lose someone you love. The speaker uses long, descriptive sentences ‘I
held her hand, that was always scarred From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in
wait…’, to express their immense memories of their dying relative, and their sense of
yearning to be in a time when they weren’t dying. Here, the speaker uses caesura to
emphasise the physical contact of holding their mother’s hand, as this physical contact is
symbolic of their mother to child connection. Furthermore, their asyndetic descriptive listing
of their mother’s actions of the onomateopiac ‘slicing’ and ‘chopping’ prolongs the read of
the poem, which is symbolic of the idea that time is still standing still for the speaker as they
remember who their mother once was.
Additionally, both poets use the idea of lack of control to express their intense emotions as a
response to birth and death. However, In ‘Effects’, the poet rather depressingly presents the
dying mother’s lack of control, and therefore dependence on others, as the nurses take away
her personal belongings, ‘And I saw that they had taken off her rings’. Indeed, the poet uses
the symbol of the rings to convey the mother’s eternal love and strength, which has now
been stripped from her, causing her to lose her own identity. In doing so, I feel the speaker is
conveying to us that their mother is no longer being allowed to love her child, or be the
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