Roger McGough: Poems Literary Elements

The poem Soil is written from the first person perspective but uses the inclusive 'we' and the directive 'you,' to directly address the earthen soil and present the speaker's relationship with it.

The Sound Collector is written in seven regular ballad quatrains with the rhyme scheme abxb.

The poem First day at School invokes the mind of a child in 'I wish I could remember my name / Mummy said it would come in useful / Like wellies.' This simile shoes the simple-mindedness of a child simply relating something of great importance, their name, to something only relevant in certain situations, 'wellies.'

In The Sound Collector, alliteration is used to convey the noise of the bath filling, 'The bubbling of the bathtub / As it starts to fill.'

The phrase 'patient and unforgiving / Toying with trees,' is ironic in the poem Soil, since the adjectives, whilst not mutually exclusive,contrast a little.

The poem Let Me Die A Youngman's Death, although seemingly about a melancholy subject, is actually quite a humorous poem.

The poem First Day At School is set 'a millionbillionwillion miles from home,' which is essentially a school. As the title states, it is the first day of school.

The tone of Let Me Die A Youngman's Death is humorous with a touch of pleading.

In the poem Soil, the protagonist is the speaker and the antagonist is partially the soil, although the roles may seem reversed at times.

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The climax of the poem Q is underwhelming: 'I join the queue. / We move up nicely,' and is a repetition of the initial action in the poem.

The opening line 'I join the queue / We move up nicely,' in the poem Q foreshadows the last stanza of the same nature. The only difference is the final stanza has two sentences whilst the first is enjambment.

In the poem Let Me Die A Youngman's Death, the relaying of death initially as simply 'a youngman's death,' is an understatement of what the speaker really desires: 'may I be mown down at dawn,' or having his mistress 'cut me up into little pieces.'

The play on the word 'bat,' added to other nouns, such as 'batwater-bottles' and 'battresses,' in the poem Goodbat Nightman alludes to the popular characters Batman and Robin, and the tendency to name their things after their characters, for example the Batmobile being the car Batman uses and his title being nominative determinism - a man who is bat-like.

The phrase 'Now they hang fro the mantelpiece / both upside down,' is perhaps representative of Batman and Robin's costumes hanging to dry but also seems ominous before the rest of the poem Goodbat Nightman is revealed. It is also a play on how bats sleep, usually upside down.

In Mrs Moon, the moon is personified as a woman 'knitting the night.' She is presented further in the alliteration of 'little old lady.'

The short, one stanza poem Beguiling uses hyperbole in 'I can run a mile / In twenty seconds,' to emphasize how 'beguiling,' the woman is to the speaker.

The poem The Sound Collector is filled with onomatopoeia and sensory language, such as 'The drumming of the raindrops,' 'the hissing of the frying pan,' and 'the whistling of the kettle.' The verbal nouns and gerunds heighten the senses so that when these sounds are lost, the 'silence,' is felt more strongly.