Analysis of Fire and Ice by Robert Forst Essay

This article tries to analyze the alone(p) features in structure, words, phonology, syntax and rhetoric in the metrical composition of 40-Love by British poet Roger McGough in order to have a deeper understanding of the content and frame of a song. Keywords McGough, 40-Love, Love, Style 1. Introduction It is well known that in a variety of literary genres, the form of poetry has been stressed most. Efforts have been exerted on the skillful combination of rhythm and structure to create numerous wide works all over the world. Modern American poet E. E. Cummings (1884-1962) is a goodly case in point.He is famous for odd style, novel and bizarre form in the poetic world. His l (a has been regarded as the the most elegant and beautiful structure of the literature created by Cummings. (Kennedy, 1980). T here(predicate)fore, his poems ar renowned as poem picture or visual poetry, or the concrete poetry that we be quite familiar with. The features of it is that vivid visual images o f words overture from irregular syllables, earns, punctuation, syntax, format and print strengthen the internal imagination of poetry, deepen the artistic conception, convey and enrich the con nonation. (Abrams, 2005). Coincidentally, besides E. E.Cummings, contemporary British poet Roger McGough (1937- ) is another hold in writing concrete poems. His 40-Love can be considered as one of the greatest concrete poems. McGough is the second of the three in Liverpool Group. The other two are Henry Adrian Henri and Patan Brian Patten. McGough, born in 1937, 5 years younger than Henry, is always in naughty mentality. His poems are full of secular fun and display to a greater extent profound life from the perspective of a child. This article, from the viewpoint of stylistics, analyzes the features of structure, words, phonology, syntax and rhetoric in the poem of 40-Love in order to gain a eeper understanding of this poem. 2. rhetorical Analysis Greek poet Simonides once said, Poetry i s the picture with sound while the pictures are the silent poems. (Zhu, 2005). That is to say, the content of a poem must be combine with its form to achieve its perfection, namely, the combination of form and spirit, what we often cherish. Here we will try to find how Mcgough do it in his 40-Love. The poem tells that a old pas de deux is vie lawn tennis. Then they go home. But the bread is still amid them. It reflects the gap amongst middle-aged couples.I will quote the poem here to help to explain my opinion. 40-Love (Peng, 2000) middle couple tenwhen game and go the 118 aged playing nis the ends they home net Asian Social Science will be tween 2. 1 Structure still be them June, 2009 As a whole, the poem has a total of 20 words. But the two words tennis and in the midst of are separated by hyphens to be symmetric in structure. The words in the poem are set in two sequences, like two sides of the couple. The middle blank or empty is like a net to separate the two. There a re only two words in severally position to symbolize the bouts of the glob.The ennoble of 40-love, the top of the net, is powerful on the top of the poem, signifying the scoreboard. This poem looks like a tennis court with a net macrocosm used to separate the words. It is like a tennis game. This side serves and the other side hits back. Many bouts form the poem. The invisible net is like the barrier between the middle-aged couple. Even if they finish the tennis game, they still have the net, which still exists invisibly. However, it is this net that they can depend on to handle their marriage and have the responsibilities not to break the rules.There is a net in tennis and on that point are rules to obey. With the net, there are more difficulty and more interests. So, accordingly, more discipline and attention is a must. Imagining that, when playing tennis with no net or rules, people would feel difficult to last their games for enormouser period. In addition, only the let ter of L of Love in the title is capitalized and the rest is de-capitalized, which shows that, to some extent, the couple has not been in the pursuit of the perfect details again, because love between the middle-aged couple has faded away.Furthermore, there is no punctuation in the whole poem, indicating that life of marriage is closed and uninteresting. Since there is no end, gap appears. 2. 2 speech communication The poet pays special attention to the words in the poem. First of all, the title 40-Love one of interests embodied in the poem. The figure of 40 stands for the age of middle-aged people. And 40-Love is a gain ground term in tennis. Tennis gain is love, 15, 30 and 45 in sequence. Love here means zero. Three goals scores 40. No goals, no score. Thus, the title is of pun with two meanings. One refers to be 40-year-old love and the other is 30.Whether 40-year-old love is vain or not depends on attitudes of the two parties. Let acclaim to two words of middle and aged in t he first line. Middle-aged means people are in their midlife. The poet deliberately separates it to achieve the reunification of form and others. It also symbolizes that middle-aged husband and wife can not be integrated again. The two important words of tennis and between are rigid in two vertical columns to get a metaphorical meaning that there is an invisible net in the emotional world of the man and the woman. They are not intimate any longer. Game in the fifth line can be referred as either play game or sport. The scoring in tennis competition is more complex. Tennis game has games and sets. In a game, those who win 15, 30 and 45 will get one point. And the faker who gets 6 points will win one set. In the poem, the couple does not finish even one game and go home since they have a deep estrangement. Still in the ninth line shows that the middle-aged husband and wife have ineffable anguish and can not get absolve of their unpleasantness and gain relaxed though they make conce ssions as far as possible. 2. Phonology Words in the poem are basically monosyllabic. They are mechanical and slow to read and easy to suggest that the life of the couple is dull and lack of amenities. From the perspective of phonology, the short vowel such as /i/, is used for some(prenominal) times in the poem to leave the pressing impression to the readers to realize the urgent emotional crisis of the middle-aged couple. But there is slowness in the urgency. The diphthong /ei/ and / u/ are employed to slow down the speech rate and demonstrate that the middle-aged people have become calm and unhurried when dealing with things.Especially, the long vowel / i / in tween in the last line leaves enough time for the middle-aged couple in crisis to think over the issue. In addition, there are rhymes in the poem, such as, middle and couple, ten and when, game and they, go and home, will and still. Rhymes here give the readers boredom, and symbolize the dull life of the middle-aged couple . Moreover, the alliterations of be and be-, tween and them, make the two words close and imply that the middle-aged husband and wife still have the ties that can not be cut stumble although there is a gap between them. 2. Syntax For the convenience of analysis, I rearrange the order of the whole poem middle aged couple playing ten-nis when the game ends and they go home the net will still be be-tween them. First of all, from the angle of tense, the plain and flat present tense, used from the beginning to the right end of the poem, indicates the dull or prosaic marriage life of the middle-aged couple. Nevertheless, playing is used unconventionally. If plays is used here, readers will know that the couple play tennis often rather than occasionally. There will be not much gap between them. Playing indicates that there is absence of regular communication between the husband and wife. It stresses that it is just at this moment that they are playing tennis. In sentence structure, there is a time adverb when to combine the sentence. As usual, however, there is no conjunction of and between the main clause and the subordinate clause. Thus and is added here to deliberately create a loose state, suggesting that there is no close butt against between the husband and wife. And there should be an adversative conjunction of but in front of the next sentence the net will still be be-tween them.As we 119 Vol. 5, No. 6 Asian Social Science all know, an adversative conjunction word usually give people an unexpected, rising and dropping impression. The word but is omitted here to inevitably imply that life of the middle-aged couple is no longer full of ups and downs, great happiness or sadness. 2. 5 figure of speech Poets often use figure of speech because, as Emily Dickinson once said, the mission of a poet is to speak the truth, but to put it in an unquestioning way in order to seize the readers interest and stimulate their imagination.In the poem of 40-love, the poet emplo ys the figure of speech, e. g. metaphor. On the one hand, in form, the blank along the net is like a net to suggest the gap between the middle-aged couple. On the other hand, everyday life is like playing games. Everybody hit the ball to the others. Such routine game results in no passion at last. Moreover, in my opinion, the writing technique of understatement is employed in this poem. The tone of the whole poem is calm, without any fluctuating. However, it is the deliberate understatement that discloses the theme of the poem incisively and vividly. . Conclusion This poem written by McGouph with unique style has rich connotation in its unique form. In this poem with perfect combination of the spirit and form, the emotional gap of the middle-aged couple can be discerned and expressed by the stylistic techniques in the structure, words, phonology, syntax and figure of speech. In Mending Wall, a poem written by American poet Robert Frost, the neighbor is intransigence and stubborn. Ev en at the last line of the poem, he still murmurs that good fences make good neighbors (GU, 2005).Every couple, therefore, especially the middle-aged couples, should pull the fence between them down, believing good communication makes good couples. References Abrams, M H. (2005). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Beijing Foreign language Teaching and Reasearch Press. Gu, Zhengkun. (2005). Treasury of Appreciating English Poems, Volume of Poetry. Kennedy, Richard S. (1980). Dreams in the Mirror A memoir of EE Cummings. New York Liveright. Peng, Yu. (2000). Two Concrete Poems. College English. Zhu, Guangqian. (2005). Poetics. Shanghai Century Publishing Group. 120