Childhood - DOAN vs Prelude

Question 1

Overview

Answer 1

Both poems depict childhood as a time of heightened sensitivity to the natural world. Childhood is a time of intense perception, innocence and emotional growth, using nature to reflecr’s soeaker evolving relationship with the world. Wordsworth idealises childhood as spiritually elevated, while Heaney presents it as rooted in bodily experience and eventual disillusionment.

Question 2

Quote 1 comparison - speakers are deeply attuned to sensory richness of nature, childhood is alive and full of wonder

Answer 2

‘And in the frosty season when the sun was set’ - situates the poem in twilight, a liminal moment
‘All year the flax dam festered’ - verb decayed connotes repulsion, disgust, yet child speaker is in awe and fascinated.

Question 3

quote 2 comparison

Answer 3

‘it was a time of rapture, clear and loud’ - youthful exuberance connoted from rapture
‘bubbles gargled delicately’ - childlike fascination, oxymoron reveals nature’s strange beauty but they appear to be in unity with the child. sound imagery of gargled is visceral and grotesque.

Question 4

quote 3 comparison - child is more deeply engaged with nature

Answer 4

‘proud and exulting like an untird horse’ - simile evokes wild and carefree animal, not constricted by societal bounds, animalistic freedom, romantic ideals
‘warm thick frogspawn that grew like clotted water’ - simile is repulsive shows child’s active engagement

Question 5

quote 4 comparison

Answer 5

‘so through the darkness and cold we flew’- metaphor connotes liberation in childhood
‘i would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks’ - colloquial tone reinforces child speaker whilst jellied specks shows participation and heightened sensitivity as a child

Question 6

quote 5 - loss of harmony, disrupted

Answer 6

‘into the tumult send an alien sound of melancholy’ - unfamiliar, perhaps shows loss of childhood innocence, growing awareness of industrial revolution
‘and then one hot days when the fields were rank’ - temporal shift, ‘rank’ - corrupted, unpleasant decay, growing disillusionment , loss of innocence probably influenced by his brother’s death

Question 7

quote 6 comparison - harmony disrupted

Answer 7

‘the orange of the evening sky died away’ - metaphor shows that childhood has come to an end, reflective of nature mirroring human emotion
‘the great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance’ anthropomorphic language evokes threatening, mythological presence.