Compare the ways the poets explore ideas about control in ‘The River
God’ (page 17) and in one other poem from Character and voice.
The river god is seen as powerful and extremely controlling by the use of the personal pronoun ‘my’ continuously through the poem. This shows that he is of high status and that he keeps possession over his belonging as the word may suggest that it belongs to him therefore he is in charge and is the owner so he has total control. The river god then goes on to say ‘I bless their swimming ‘which means that he is probably god like as the reader would think that you can only take blessing of something that is of high status and can be very controlling, because of the fact that he has so much power so he has the ability to control other because he is much higher than them. In comparison to ‘les grande seigneur’ , in the beginning there was a very similar sense of high control and personal possession over others as she say’s ‘the men were my buttresses’ which again shows the high control she had through the personal pronoun of ‘my’ as if to say that she owner the men because she had such high status. Later on in the poem explained that ‘she was their queen’ which again has emphasis on how controlling she was because she was enabled with the high powered which enabled her to be controlling. The fact that this is in the past tense may imply that she has lost that control and would like it back through the exaggeration when she said she was a ‘queen’, which would connote to the idea of high control of ruling and power.
Another ways these two poems are similar is in the way that they both have a strong sense of rules and order. In the river god the read can infer this when he say ‘I can drown the fools…’ which shows show that has higher in the hierarchy as he looks at people below him as ‘fools’. He then goes on to say ‘…who bathe to close to the weir, contrary to rules’. This show that he does have rules which people don’t listen to and has punishments set aside for them. This shows that he is controlling because of the fact that rules which he wants people to obey them, the punishment have high emphasise on how controlling he is because it shows that he only likes thing going in his way, very similar to a dictator. Whereas in ‘les grande seigneur’ there are some ideas of ruling at the end when she loses power, as she says ‘my husband clicked his fingers’ which controls how much power he has over her now. It gives the reader a sense of imagery of her being treated like an animal through hand signals which highlight the amount of power that she has lost but also how much control her husband has gained now. The word ‘clicked’ shows the lack of respect he has for her but could also show that her husband is of a much higher status and is extremely controlling toward her because of the amount of power he has gained from her.
One difference would be the structure of both the poems. The river god is structure almost like a ‘river’ as the poem is continuous and has no stanzas and has not stop in-between just like a river, this may mean that the river god is in total control of himself because there is no structure so he can do what he like. The structure of ‘les grande seigneur’ is set into four separate stanzas which could reflect upon the character of the husband as it may show high control and strictness because he has what she is told to do, she cannot freely flow like the river god because she has no control.