Nature - DOAN vs Prelude Flashcards
(7 cards)
Overview Paragraph
Both poems place a focus on nature. William Wordsworth uses his poem as a vehicle to herald the immense beauty of the natural world, reflective of his Romantic belief in the sublime. Whereas, Heaney uses his poem as a vehicle to highlight both nature’s wonder and its threat, exposing the natural’s world complexity and duality. Drawing on his rural Irish upbringing, Heaney explores childhood interactions with nature, growing from innocence to disillusionment.
QUOTE 1 COMPARISON - Nature is fertile, abundant, Wordsworth idealises, Heaney is realistic
‘And in the frosty season when the sun was set’ - sibilance, evokes peaceful & tranquility, emotional refuge
‘All year the flax dam festered’ - verb connotes decay, child is not repulsed, biologically active, nature’s strange beauty
QUOTE 2 - Nature is fertile, abundant, Wordsworth idealises, Heaney is realistic COUNTY DERRY
‘it was a time of rapture, clear and loud’ - noun ‘rapture’ captures overwhelming joy spent within nature
‘bubbles gargled delicately’ - oxymoron; tactile & grotesque imagery to reflect child speaker’s fascination
QUOTE 3 COMPARISON - Nature’s portrayal becomes more intensive and powerful
‘Proud and exulting like an untired horse’ - simile, evokes wild and carefree animal, joyful unity, boundless energy
‘Warm thick frogspawn that grew like clotted water’ - simile, teeming with life but lacks idealism, grotesque, repulsive disgust and fascination
Quote 4 comparison - Nature’s portrayal becomes more intensive and powerful
‘So through the darkness and cold we flew’ - metaphor ‘we flew’; liberation, transcending the natural world
‘I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks’ - heaney’s intrusion and control over nature, colloquial ‘jampotfuls’ : symbolic of naive, invasive curiosity
Quote 5 comparison - harmony between nature and child becomes disrupted, each poet deals with loss differently
‘Into the tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy’ - reflects sudden emotional shift, once-joyful nature has become unfamiliar and spiritually unsettling
‘And then one hot day when the fields were rank’ - ‘and one hot day’: temporal shift, rupture with nature is externalised, ‘rank’ implies corrupted, overwhelming unpleasant.
Quote 6 comparison - nature and childhood harmony is disrupted, poets deal with loss in different ways
wordsworth describes dimming of light - ‘orange of evening sky died away’ - metaphor of died away fading beauty signifies child’s growing detachment from natural world
‘the great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance’ - anthropomorphises the frogs evokes threatening, mythological presence, earlier child’s intrusion into nature is being punished.
