Men at Forty and The Tyger are two intense poems written using creative language that seems to radically alter the mood of each piece. These two poems about strong and bold things are transformed into soft stanzas that float on the reader's tongue and resonate like peaceful songs. Donald Justice uses sweet words throughout Men at Forty to display a feeling of gentleness and innocence in his poem while William Blake plays with rhyming couplets to describe this same reading experience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Justice's poem, Men at Forty, written in 1967, tells the story of a young boy and how he grows up to become a man like his. father. There are scenes in which the subject - an older man - watches himself as a young boy while he "practices tying / His father's tie", providing the reader with a strong visual image of how the boy will become the man his father is. Although this aging seems graceful at first, other parts of the poem show the difficulties of leaving childhood behind and becoming an older man. Examples of this are when the author describes the man “Resting on a stair landing, / [He feels him] moving.” » With age, the body changes and it can become less reliable, which is why humans need breaks like this. This is where the darkest and harshest parts of the poem come into play. Blake's 1794 poem The Tyger is different from Men at Forty in that it immediately gives off a sense of darkness. While Justice's poem danced and oscillated between the positive and negative aspects of aging, Blake's poem dives straight into this intense poem full of questions that almost demand answers from the reader. His piece describes a strong, tough animal and questions its creator. Blake asks what kind of creature would dare to create one as intense and deadly as a tiger. One might expect Men at Forty to be strong or harsh to match the characters in the poem, but that is not how the poem turned out. There is a feeling of gentleness that is found at least once in each stanza. In the first stanza, the word “gently” stands out. With the second stanza, we could focus on the words “swell” and “soft.” In the third stanza, we find gentle terms like “hot” and “froth.” Finally, the word “dusk” is embedded in the last stanza. Justice's choice of language in this poem radically changes what a reader would expect to find when reading the title of the poem. The contrast between the initial predictions and the final outcome of the poem is therefore unexpected, very similar to Blake's work in his poem. The Tyger was unpredictable and was created in such a way that the language differed from the initial thoughts a reader might have about it. similar to Men at Forty. However, rather than the soft, gentle language being the cause of this unpredictability, the contradictory qualities of this poem are the result of the rhyme. The musicality implemented by Blake throughout this poem gives it an optimistic and innocent sound which very clearly goes against the feeling of harshness that the title gives off. He implements a rhyme scheme of rhyming couplets in each stanza throughout the poem to give this seemingly serious poem its lighter, more musical tone and therefore the darkness of the words in this poem are metaphorically illuminated by the sounds that he creates. Keep in mind: This is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get.