Winter Swans, Owen Sheers

• Context


  • Work tends to focus on relationships and challenges people face

  Often uses welsh landscape as inspiration - uses nature in his work
• ‘Clouds had given their all’ 


  pathetic fallacy to represent the strained and stormy

  conflict - foreboding atmosphere
• ‘Waterlogged earth gulping for breath’ 


  personification, claustrophobic atmosphere -

  suffocating + exhausting mirrors speaker’s emotions
• ‘Skirted the lake, silent and apart,’


  caesura emphasises awkwardness in relationship,

  avoiding each other emotionally despite physical closeness
• ‘Like boats righting in rough weather’


  simile: nature (swans) motivate them to resolve
• ‘Like a pair of wings settling after flight’

  image of stability
• In unison’ ‘Halved themselves’ 


  semantic field of pairs/unity desire to be together
• ‘They mate for life.. I didn’t reply’ 


  lack of communication in the relationship. Swans -

  symbol of timeless love
• ‘Dark water’ ‘white feather’ 


  contrasting language reflects hardships
• Couplet at the end

  unlike 6 tercets, suggests resolution to separation/tension - however does not rhyme
• Themes and comparisons


  • Letters from Yorkshire: show disruption of separation, nature mirrors emotions in a

  relationships (comparisons to bad weather + nature provides connections, sensory imagery), physical vs emotional detachment (emotionally distant vs close, broken communication vs easy, physical closeness is the resolution vs emotional closeness)

  Love’s Philosophy: frustration of denied physical closeness (caesura, awk dialogue and rqs), physical love is unifying (swans, natural imagery), final resolutions