edexcel igcse english literature poetry comparison essay

Hi. Would someone be able to mark my comparison essay between War Photographer and Prayer Before Birth as to how they portray horrors of the world out of 30? Thanks.

War Photographer x Prayer Before Birth
Compare how the writers present the horrors of the world.

In both poems, the poets explore the negatives aspects of the world, presenting a deeply pessimistic version of it. While Duffy focuses on the horrors of war and society’s desensitised response, MacNeice explores an unborn child's terror of a morally decaying world.
Both poets highlight humanity’s capacity for violence, yet differ in how they frame the experience of suffering. In War Photographer, Duffy explores this capacity through brutal, visceral images of human suffering in real-life conflict. She describes the children as “running…in a nightmare heat”. This reference to napalm attacks during the Vietnam war creates immediately a relatable image to the reader, detaching the event from fiction and referencing events that make the poem feel more “real”. The word "nightmare" suggests both unreality and the horror’s relentless familiarity, implying that such suffering is now disturbingly routine. The horrors are external to the speaker as the photographer is a witness, an observer whose role is to document rather than intervene. By contrast, MacNeice in Prayer Before Birth internalises this horror as the child is anticipating the act of being consumed by a cruel, violent world. The surreal images "bloodsucking bat" and "club-footed ghoul" personify abstract evils, creating a semantic field of a nightmarish future in which violence is not merely observed but inflicted upon the self from the very onset of life. The piling up of grotesque images through polysyndeton creates a breathless fear, as if evil is closing in from all sides. Therefore, ultimately, they contrast through their differing ways of showcasing this horror in the world. Duffy’s horror as to the situation of the world is witnessed and mediated through the lens of a camera while MacNeice’s is intimate and unavoidable even going to the lengths of suggesting that to live at all is to be contaminated by violence.
Moreover, both poets also show a level of helplessness in the face of this pervasive horror, yet the kinds of impotence they portray differ greatly. Duffy presents, in War Photographer the photographer’s impotence through the line "he earns his living and they do not care." The casual phrasing of "do not care" implies a blunt, chilling indifference on the part of the public. Duffy’s regular stanza form and controlled ABBCDD rhyme scheme mirror the photographer’s attempt to impose structure on chaos, yet ironically highlight his failure to effect real change. The metaphor "a hundred agonies in black and white" reduces profound suffering to monochrome simplicity, suggesting that even agony becomes flattened and sanitised by distance and media. On the other hand, in Prayer Before Birth, the speaker’s helplessness is existential. The imperative appeals "O hear me", "console me", "forgive me" escalate in intensity, creating an increasingly frantic rhythm. The fragmentation of the poem’s form, with abrupt enjambment and unpredictable line lengths, mirrors the speaker’s growing panic and disintegration of control, the structure in lines 30-37 with the decreasing line length showcasing agency slipping away like water seeping through the hands and thistledown falling to the ground. When MacNeice writes "dragoon me into a lethal automaton", the verb "dragoon" evokes the brutal loss of individuality, suggesting that the speaker is powerless to resist being shaped into an agent of violence. Therefore, Duffy’s portrayal of helplessness against the world is presented as professional and societal while MacNeice’s is due to a fundamental lack of agency where one’s future and nature are controlled.
Both poets finally critique societal moral decay, but differ in tone and focus. Duffy’s condemnation of public apathy is laced with bitter irony. His description of "the reader’s eyeballs prick / with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers." The internal rhyme here between “tears” and “beers” trivialises the emotional response, suggesting that empathy is fleeting and shallow, overshadowed by domestic luxury. The bath and the beers symbolise the Western reader’s comfort, violently juxtaposed against the suffering the photographer captures which are “blood stained”. In contrast, MacNeice’s vision of moral decay is totalising and catastrophic. His speaker anticipates being manipulated by "wise lies" and "those who would freeze my humanity." The oxymoron "wise lies" captures the, in his opinion, irrational sophistication of societal corruption, while the metaphor "freeze my humanity" suggests a chilling, irreversible loss of compassion and moral feeling. Even beauty is tainted as the child predicts that "white waves call me to folly." The alliteration of "white waves" creates a calm yet sinister auditory effect, implying that even seemingly pure forces are deceptive and destructive. Therefore, while Duffy criticises passivity and forgetting, MacNeice laments the utter collapse of innocence and moral integrity before life even begins.
To conclude, ultimately, both poems present incredibly pessimistic, bleak portrayals of the world and its cruel nature. Duffy presents a professional witness to suffering whose work is rendered futile by public indifference, using cold, precise imagery and bitter irony. MacNeice, on the other hand, voices a desperate, unborn child terrified of inevitable corruption, using surreal imagery, frantic structure, and escalating appeals.