Differences in writing from 1945-present - Essay Example

“Church Going” and “The Sharping Stone” are very similar looking poems at first glance. This is because, at their most basic level, these poems both rest on the same poetic foundations. Each poem is about sixty lines long, divided into seven and six stanzas respectively. (Larkin, Heaney). The main reason they appear so similar, however, is that they both share the same poetic structure, blank verse. This poetic structure, with each line five sets of two stressed-unstressed syllable pairings and no rhyme scheme, gives both poems a simultaneous feel of modernity (because of the unrhymed, prose-style structure) and timelessness (due to their use of Iambs, the same poetic structure that Shakespeare wrote in).

Clearly some of the timeless forms of English poetic structure span the tale of years and are used at the opening of the twenty-first century much in the same way they were in the middle of the twentieth. While they appear very similarly on the page due to utilizing the same length, stanza structure and poetic pattern, reading the poems reveal that they have more differences than similarities. “The Church Going” relies on a simple narrative structure to convey its messages, telling a story in a logical order in the first person: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud shut” (Larkin lines 1-3).

This story flows in a chronological order and makes perfect sense to the reader as such. Seamus Heaney, however, creates a series of detailed vignettes, changing scene from “an apothecary’s chest of drawers” to “Airless cinder-depths” and even switching person from first to third throughout, depending on what was most appropriate for the scene (Heaney 1, 7). While these two poems share the same bones, very different structures are built on them, from Larkin’s classic and relatively simple narrative to Heaney’s incredibly complex series of seemingly disconnected vignettes.

An examination of short stories shows that, much like poetry, short stories have the have the same fundamentals even over a sixty year time-span. Both Bradbury’s “The Veldt” shares the same basic short story format, with exposition, rising action, a climax and a resolution. Both books open with an introduction of the characters: two parents, George and Lydia in “The Veldt and Ruma and her father in “Unaccustomed Earth” (Bradbury 7, Lahiri 3). This exposition section is quickly followed by the generation of conflict, in the forms of a broken holographic nursery which produces a lion-filled jungle to hunt the parents in “The Veldt” (Bradbury 9) and the conflict between father and daughter over acclimatization to new cultures in “Unaccustomed Earth” (Lahiri 5).

Both stories also have an unexpected event for a climax and a brief denouement (Bradbury, Lahiri). Though sixty years separate them, Bradbury and Lahiri both use the same tried and true formula, and the most basic of elements of both of their stories strongly resemble each other in that respect. Like in the case of poetry, however, the structural similarities do not translate to similarities in the more nuanced aspects of each work. One of the biggest areas of difference is the sensory experience given by each book. “