Strawberries - critical essay

Strawberries – Critical Essay Christopher Callaghan 12th September 2012 “ Strawberries” by Edwin Morgan is a loving poem, which explores the wonders of human emotions such as love, lust and fear. The poet’s purpose in writing this piece was to educate the reader and to evoke emotions with poetic techniques. Morgan uses some extremely effective metaphors in this poem to describe his relationship with his partner: “ We dipped them in sugar, looking at each other. ” The sugar signifies that there is something artificial about the relationship, that it needs sweetened. “ Looking at each other” signifies how confident and at ease they are around each other. This lets the reader know that this is a real relationship which has matured through time. The poet also uses sentence structure to show how memories fade through time, the further the reader goes through the poem, the shorter each stanza gets. This shows that the poet wanted to write the memory down before he forgot it. The writer also uses very clever word choice to enhance the reader’s understanding of the situation: “ With the two forks crossed. ” This hints to the reader that the poem is in fact about two men. Morgan couldn’t obviously point this out as at the time it was written, homosexuality was illegal. This lets the reader know difficult it must have been for someone not being allowed to express their love without the fear of persecution. I think that it is wrong to force someone to hide their love, no matter what form. In conclusion, “ Strawberries” is a loving, thought provoking poem which shows that there is nothing sinful about love. Morgan uses effective poetry techniques such as sentence structure and metaphors to show that any form of love is still love.