Paper 2 Sample question

The language of a poem is often that one thing compared to another. In the work of at least two poets you have studied, explore how poets have made their subjects come alive through different means of comparing them.

In order to express her will of being unnoticed and Nobody, Emily Dickinson uses multiple strategies in her poem 'I'm nobody, who are you?' to do so. First of all, by setting different types of the tone of the stanzas, Dickinson expresses her own opinion of being Nobody and Somebody. After interacting and knowing that the reader is also Nobody, Dickinson expresses a happy emotion by using an exclamation mark, saying 'Then there's a pair of us!'. By showing the excitement of finding that the reader is also anti-social like herself, she shows happiness in this stanza. And right after she brings up the excitement, she infers the public as 'them', which shows how she does not like the idea of being exposed. In the second stanza, Dickinson mainly focuses on the description of Somebody. There are multiple words she uses to describe Somebody, such as dreary and frog, which as all negatively used here. By also using exclamation marks in the first line, she expresses the opposite emotion in the first stanza; she thinks that being Somebody is not as exciting as being Nobody. She also uses a simile to express how she dislikes being Somebody. In the second line of the second stanza, she describes people being Somebody as a frog, which is loud and annoying. Overall, by comparing the goods of being Nobody and the bads of being Somebody, Dickinson expresses her opinion of her identity.

The second poem 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant' also has comparisons used to express Emily Dickinson's opinion on the way of telling the truth. Firstly, the name of the poem itself is contradicting since she says tell all the truth but in a slant way; by saying this, Dickinson means that sometimes a fully told truth may be too 'bright' for people's infirm delight. In the last two lines of the poem, there is another comparison where Dickinson says that there are two choices: you either gradually tell the truth, or the truth will be hurtful so that 'every man be blind.' By using this comparison, Dickinson expresses her idea that people cannot take the truth once at the time.

In conclusion, in both two poems, Dickinson uses great comparisons to express her ideas and opinions on certain issues she has observed, which reflects her own personality.

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