How does Cope so powerfully convey her feeling about the past in this poem?
Wendy Cope is a very sarcastic and ironic and sarcastic poet and her poems often express different messages and feelings through her poems. She does this though her descriptive techniques her prevailing language and her ability to create a setting. This essay will look at how Cope powerfully conveys her feelings in the poem “On finding an Old Photograph.”
In the poem Wendy effectively builds a picture for the reader to give them an insight on what the picture is like. She often does this by using onamatipia; “women dressed in white blouses that brush the grass.” The onamatipia occurs on the word ‘brush’ this helps make the poem all the more real for the reader. “In an apple orchard, sunlight patching his stylish bags;” this quote sets the place for the photograph again expanding on the ambience of the setting. Wendy moves on to mention the time and location, “Yalding, 1912”, the fact that this photo was taken in ‘1912’ is interesting because it is the year that the Titanic sank and this sets a bad tone for the poem, it implies to the reader that there are no good memories coming from this photograph. The descriptive techniques really do send across powerful feelings to the reader.
Cope has written the poem in a very mysterious manner, it is made to clear to the reader that the poem is about her father as it mentions this is the first line of the first stanza but it is never clear who “a child with curly hair” is. The “child” part creates obscurity and conveys her feelings powerfully as you never know who the child is and this adds to her ever growing sadness. The child could very well be her father or even a sibling, this creates tension as the program progresses.
In the third stanza it becomes obvious how much this photo emotionally effects Wendy Cope by her frequent use of enjolment