Out of the numerous poems that I read it is amazing just how much joy or sorrow can be found in a poem. I think it is easy for people to recognise this in a poem because everyone can relate to the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, all in very different ways. For myself as a reader it is the sorrow expressed throughout the poems that emerged as a stronger aspect.
             The reason for this is due to the fact that I find it much harder to convert from a sad to happy feeling than it is from a happy to sad feeling. If something is to go wrong in your family and you're in a happy state then you all of a sudden become sad. If you're unhappy it takes quite a lot of hard work and humour to crack a smile. To me sadness seems to be a more lasting emotion, whereas joy is more transitory and temporary.
             In a way some of the poems I studied are very positive in the way they are portrayed to the reader. These poems do give you a sense of joy when you read them. With poems like G.M. Hopkins "The Windhover", the exhilarating feeling a man gets when he rises to see a windhover of "brute beauty and valour" glide like a skater and show it's "mastery" after the sun shines upon it. Even in William Blake's "The Lamb", "Little Lamb, God bless thee" shows the innocence of a lamb, which is related to as an infant child. It is a metaphor to show how free in spirit and life a child of such character can be. Some poems are also very uplifting in the way they relate to things so close to home. Philip Hodgins in his poem "Milk Cream Butter" shows the normal day of a farmer waking and taking "whatever clothes he'd worn all week". People may think this is a very untidy thing do but for a farmer they don't have the luxury of clean clothes everyday. For me it is a pleasant reality.
             Hodgins also explains the landscape in such explicit detail that...