Preview

Overhead in County Slogi and Woman Work - Comparison

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
866 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Overhead in County Slogi and Woman Work - Comparison
In this essay where I am going to discuss the similaritys and differences between two poems. "Woman Work" written by Maya Angelou, which is about a woman who works all the time and just wants to rest. The second poem is called "overheard in County Sigo" written by Gillian Clarke which is about a married woman having a conversation with her friend about her life and looking back at what her ambitions were.
<br>
<br>"Woman Work" is a regular 5 stanza, rhyming poem, It is set in southern USA. We know this because of the way she talkes "The cane to be cut" Cane is grown in southern USA, "I gotta clean up this hut" Hut is what she calles her house "And the cotton to Pick" cotton also grows in USA. It's about this womanwho's either single or doesn't get any help from her partener/husband. She's always doing something, looking after the children - "I've got the children to tend", housework - "I gotta clean up this hut", shopping - "The food to shop" or farmwork, - "The cane to be cut", "And the cotton to pick".
<br>
<br>"Overheard in County Sligo" is another regular 5 stanza, rhyming poem. It is set in Ireland. It is about a married woman who "married a man from county Roscommon" and she's talking about what her ambitions were - "I had thaught to work on the Abbey Stage" "or have my name in a book". It doesn't sound like she's happy but she won't leave - "the freedom's there for the taking" but she never went.
<br>
<br>There are several themes in "Woman work", one of them being Work. We can see this in the first stanza . She lists all the things she's got to do. Another theme being lonleiness. We can see this by the fact that she only mentions her children there, she may want someone to talk to her or help her with all her work. Mainly she just wants a rest.
<br>
<br>The theme in "Overheard in county Sligo" is basically life, it's all about a woman having a conversation with a friend or someone she knows and someone else just happened to be listening. The housewife is

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    During the war since most of the men were off fighting, the women were needed to stay home and run things so that the economy would not completely fall apart. Women had to take over men’s work to ensure that the jobs were fulfilled this was a huge step for most women as before all that they knew was house work and how to look after the kids. The following source explains the wages and problems women had whilst working. Source A5, is useful to me because it tells me how much women earned in the munitions factories and whether or not they liked it. In domestic service women did not like the work, but when they started to work in such places like the munitions factory some changed their minds and actually enjoyed it. ‘I started on hand-cutting shell fuses, we worked twelve hours a day apart from the journey morning and night, as for wages; I was very well off earning £5 a week’. Source A5 was written by the memories of women’s lives that were altered by the war the main write being Mrs H. Felstead. These memories are shown in the ‘Imperial War Museum’ for the public. This source is reliable because it states when it was written and who wrote it. However the source might not be completely reliable because the memories of the women may have changed since then; I think that source A5 could also be biased in some way or another. The purpose of this source is to show what it was like 1914-1918. Source A7 links in with source A5 because it is also talking about wages in the First World War. Source A7 is reliable to me because of what is written in the poem, it was about the munitions factory in 1917. The source might not be entirely reliable because there is a chance that…

    • 1426 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Ways of Her Household” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, we read about the daily work that three women did to keep their households running. In our class discussions we mentioned how a woman's work in the house was crucial to the household economy because if women did not do housework, men would need to stay home to get the housework done and would not be able to earn wages. In Jeanne Boydston’s article “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence” we again read about unpaid labor as a form of employment for women. Boydston writes, “Within the household, wives’ labor produced as much as half of the family subsistence.” Boydston also writes that a woman’s labor is, “necessary to produce a husband’s labor-power.” Ulrich and Boydston are both arguing that women's labor is important, even if they are not earning wages, which Lydia Maria Child would also…

    • 1969 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Some synonyms of the definition work, "activity of body, of mind, of a machine, or of a natural force" are stated as labor, toil, drudgery and grind. The poem gives great examples of how mentally challenging this woman's work is to her stability and well being. As she explains by the example of the magazine sales how she quit…

    • 446 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Robert Bridges 'Eros'

    • 339 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Compare and contrast the two poems; analyzing how poet uses literary devices to make his point.…

    • 339 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poem, Suburban Sonnet, idealizes the harsh realities of an Australian housewife, creating sympathetic tones to the readers. Gwen Harwood was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1920. Harwood was raised in a family of strong women, her grandmother earning her own living until she was 80, and her mother was a feminist who was into community issues. Her family was self-sufficient and this can be noted in the themes of some of her poems. Gwen Harwood's poetry is written in a 1950’s context. A woman's concerns then would not have been expressed. It was a woman's responsibility and place to make a home for her husband, upkeep it and raise a family, all the while making the duty seem effortless and enjoyable. An example of this “She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread,” (stanza one, line thirteen). It is negative, bitter and melancholic. This appears to the readers that Harwood would like to creative a negative view of Australian motherhood. This discourse is evidenced at early as the first line “She practises a fugue, though it can matter to no one now if she plays well or not.” (stanza one, line one).…

    • 699 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As stated before, these two poems are very similar in a whole. They both carry a strength throughout their entire poems. The poems also shows people who are overcoming obstacles in their lives, within society, and how it effects them. The dignity and fortitude of the people develop the future of America. Both of these poems also strive to create a better society. In general, both of the poems have a deeper meaning than what is actually stated. Positive messages are also brought forth.…

    • 273 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Mill Poem Analysis

    • 2268 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Working has become part of the norm in today’s society for both men and women in the American culture. People waste so much of their life and time in their occupation, that it seems that is the only part of their life that is significant. Jobs revolve around the world and people are so caught up within them. Human beings are turning away from love and family, focusing on their work and not human life that is meant to be spent with loved ones. This theme of work over family has become a major issue and theme within a few poems. This idea of choosing work over life is evident within the poems “The Mill” by Edwin Arlington Robinson and “The Secretary Chant” by Marge Piercy. Both of these poems discover what working is to that individual and how…

    • 2268 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both poems use first-person voices, however the "I" is different for each poem, in order to fulfill Hughes' purpose for the poem.…

    • 497 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    This poem is also a message to young women. Denise Levertov admonishes them of the prison that housewife life can be with the earthwoman’s tiring…

    • 2382 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mississippi River and Essay

    • 9263 Words
    • 38 Pages

    The writer Donna Smith-Yackel’s mother did lots of work throughout her life. She was a mother of more than half dozen of children. While her children were growing up she had to do many works, tasks and household chores to sustain or to keep family going. After her marriage, she helped her husband in farming. She learned to set hens, and raise chickens, feed pigs, milk cows, plant and harvest a garden and carry every fruits and vegetables. She carried water nearly a quarter of a mile from well to fill her wash boilers in order to do her laundry on a scrub board. She also had to shuck grain, feed threshers, and shock and husk corn, feed corn pickers. In winter she sewed dresses, trousers and jackets for the children, housedresses, aprons for herself. She even made pillows from plucking each bird’s breast feathers, not only for her family but also for her relatives. Every morning and evening she milked cows, fed pigs and calves, cared for her chickens, picked eggs, cooked meals, washed dishes, rubbed floors. Apart from these works and household chores she had to look after her children. Even after her car accident and she was paralyzed she didn’t stop working. From her wheel chairs she canned pickles, baked bread, ironed clothes, wrote dozens of letters weekly to her friends and children.…

    • 9263 Words
    • 38 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Fanny Fern’s “The Working-Girls of New York” a vivid portrayal of working women in the nineteenth century is made. This piece talks about women who come to work to support their families, or so that they can have freedom. These women wake up and work in horrible factory conditions all day, and then either send their money home to parents or children or they keep it for themselves so that they are still able to have freedom. The work their fingers to the bone all day for money that was less than what a man would earn. They work to produce goods in these factories that they work in and get paid very little while their mistress or boss gets half of the money earned from the goods that they made. If they collectively made two-hundred dollars, the Madame gets half of it. And then distributes the rest after the expenses of the business to the women that are employed. In Fern’s work she wrote “ but chiefly, and mainly, because when six o’clock in the evening comes they are their own mistresses” (Fern 596). Shortly after she also wrote this: “ this same modiste employed twenty-five girls at the starvation price of three dollars and a half a week” (Fern 597). This two quotes from “The Working-Girls of New York” demonstrate how hard the working girls worked, and how little they earned. For them it was worth it because in the end they each had a little bit of freedom once the work day was…

    • 1328 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    It has been known that throughout many centuries the women’s role was to provide domestic care in the household. During the nineteenth century, modification was in the air and the industrial revolution involved the movement of labor and resources away from agriculture and towards manufacturing industries was in progress. As a result many women were moving from domestic life to the industrial world. The family economy was replaced by a new patriarchy which saw women moving from the small, safe world of family and home-based work to larger factories and sweatshops.…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    I Too Sing America 1

    • 2146 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Context and Purpose: “Today we will compare and contrast two very different poems, one of which was written as a response to the first one. We will again practice our skill at analysis, and do a compare and contrast, which simply means finding the similarities and the differences, and putting…

    • 2146 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analyse how the writers of the two poems you have studied have developed an important theme?…

    • 1257 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    I Too Poem Analysis

    • 1114 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Recently, my class read “I, Too” by Langston Hughes and “Dreams” by Nikki Giovanni. “I, Too” differs and is similar to “Dreams” in many ways. These two poems are written by two different authors. The subject of the poems is the same. The mood is similar and there is also a similarity between the styles in the poems. These two poems have many similarities and few differences. In both poems, the speakers reveal their feelings of inequality and their desire to be equal.…

    • 1114 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays