Poem: is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response.
Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme. This comparative commentary talks about the poem “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke and “Colonization in Reverse” by Louise Bennett. The poem of Rupert Brook talks about a soldier of England that is reflecting and he realized that gave his life for England is an honorable way to die. In the poem of Colonization in Reverse the author Louise Bennett talks about how the people of Jamaica started to search for good opportunities of work and the author explain that if this continues, the expansion of Jamaican workers, Jamaica will conquer England. The thematic link is that both poems talk about England but one poem is written by an England citizen and the other by a Jamaican author, but this doesn’t means that one of the poems is better.
The intention of Rupert Brooke is to transmit to the reader the idea of how noble was to give the life for England, in this quote of his poem we can perceive his idea of die for England:
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England”
Brooke entirely believed that dying for his country was an honourable way of die. However, he never faced the reality of the war because he died before the battle. In contrast with Louise Bennett that lived in the times of the Independence of Jamaica, Bennett gave a more realistic description of the life form in that time as a Jamaican citizen. She explained her idea of expansion in her poem and we can see it in this quote:
“Dem a pour out a Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan”
Jamaicans had the intention of conquer England but they didn’t achieve that objective and that effort is represented in the poem of Bennett.
Analyzing the poems with can notice that the structure of the poems is different because the poem of “The soldier” is logical because it is specific with the ideas that the author wants to transmit. The poem of “Colonization in Reverse” is structured in a circular form because it started talking about England and colonization and ended talking about colonization and England.
Contrasting the language used by the authors we can notice that Louise Bennett used a figurative language because she used words in a nonstandard way, words that are common in other type of English, in this case English characterized of Jamaica. As an example of the poem, Bennett used words like: “dem” referring to “them” also she used the word “fe” for the word “few”. In contrast with the poem of Bennett, Rupert Brooke used a correct use of words and this makes easier to the reader to understand what the author is trying to express.
Another important thing that we can compare and contrast in the two poems are the Stylistic devices that are the elements that the author uses to give character to his /her text. For example in the poem of Colonization in Reverse, Bennett used repetition in some cases for make emphasis in a special part, for example in this case:
“Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see da turnabout?”
Using repetition as a stylistic device Bennett made that his two sentences distinguish, this quote mean that is funny that Jamaica was conquered by England and now Jamaican citizens are working for conquer England, that is why the poem is called “Colonization in Reverse”. Rupert Brooke used as stylistic devices punctuation and word choice, for example we can see this quote:
“A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
As we can see the use of punctuation gave a character of order to the text and this made it easier to read it.
In conclusion we compare and contrast these two poems that both talk about England, after notice the differences of the poems we should be aware that the authors lived in different circumstances, Rupert Brooke was an English writer that never faced the reality of the war because he died before, and Louise Bennett was a Jamaican author that lived the independence of Jamaica so she had a better vision in what she wanted to write. Finally we conclude that both poems talk about the same, the vision of the people and how they feel proud about their country.
Word Count: 790
