Choose 2 Gillian Clarke poems where she has used ordinary events on her farm in Wales to reflect on more serious current affairs. Compare and contrast the methods that Clarke uses to reflect her feelings towards her subject matter.

GCSE: English Literature

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The poems I have chosen are “The Field-Mouse” and “A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998” because in both poems Clarke uses an event on her farm to reflect on a more serious event somewhere else in the world. In “The Field-Mouse”, harvest time in the Gillian Clarke’s fields and the deaths in the animal kingdom make her think about the human slaughter in the fields of Europe in the early 1990s in the country formerly known as Yugoslavia. In “A Difficult Birth”, she compares the struggle an old ewe has in giving birth to the struggles of politicians as they try to reach a peace agreement over Northern Ireland over Easter 1998.

In both poems Clarke comes across as a caring and compassionate person. She cares about both the creatures on her farm and human suffering elsewhere in the world. For example, she uses PATHOS (this is when a poet writes in a way that’s meant to make you feel sad) in her description of the field-mouse when she talks of it “quivering” and in “agony big as itself”. The bravery and spirit of the little mouse comes across in the phrase “its black eyes two sparks burning”. Clarke clearly cares about its suffering. In “A Difficult Birth”, she does not describe the ewe in the same way. Instead it is her actions that speak for her: she is not prepared to wait for the “white coats” and decides that she and the ewe will work together as two females, who do not need men to interfere:
“We strain together”

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