Gillian Clarke: Poems Literary Elements

The poem ‘’Death of a Cat’’ is told from the perspective of a first person subjective narrator and point of view.

The poem ‘’Falling’’ is written in an iambic pentameter.

In the poem ‘’Falling’’, the narrator compares herself with a porcelain bowl which falls on the ground. The comparison is used here to show just how fragile humans are and how, despite our apparent toughness, we can break easily.

We find an instance of alliteration in the line ‘’ He fitted hinges and a lock of brass and a bright key’’ in the poem entitled ‘’My Box’’.

N/A

The poem ‘’Taid’s Funeral’’ is a meditative poem in which the narrator mourns her grandfather’s death.

The action of the poem ‘’Death of a Cat’’ takes place in the middle of the night in the back yard of the narrator’s house.

The tone in the poem ‘’Taid’s Funeral’’ is a depressing and violent one.

The protagonist in the poem ‘’Taid’s Funeral’’ is the narrator and the antagonist is death.

The major conflict in the poem ‘’The Hare’’ is between reality and expectations.

The poem ‘’Death of a Cat’’ reaches its climax when the cat is buried in the middle of the night.

The mentioning of the crying child in the poem ‘’The Hare’’ foreshadows the death of the female character which talked with the narrator in the poem.

In the poem ‘’Falling’’, the narrator expresses her conviction that her lover will catch her if she were to fall. This however proves to be an understatement as the narrator falls without anyone there to catch her and the narrator ends up hurting herself in the process.

In the poem entitled ‘’Binary’’, the narrator alludes to the idea that in our society, there are only right and wrong and there is no middle ground which a person can chose without suffering the consequences.

In the poems ‘’Falling’’ and ‘’Death of a Cat’’, the bones are mentioned to suggest the inner feelings a person has and which a person refuses to share them with other people.

We find a personification in the lines ‘’ The falling sun /gradually drowns it, rung by rung’’ in the poem ‘’ Shadows in Llanbadarn’’.

We find a hyperbole in the poem ‘’The Hare’’ in the line "Even in dying you menstruated as a woman in health’’.

We find onomatopoeia in the lines "clotting the skull and silence /like the note of an organ /hanging in the locked air’’ in the poem ‘’Death of a Cat’’.