A comparison of the two poems, ‘The Isles of Scilly’ and ‘At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux’

The two poems express grieving for the dead, and both use similar language in some respects in their use of metaphors and language and are very emotional in their content in order to convey the feeling of grief for the large numbers of dead appropriately. Curiously, for two such emotional poems, they both bear very nonchalant and almost clinical titles, both simply naming the place that the poem is about which clearly in no way indicates the emotional content of the poem, seemingly fulfilling no real purpose other than to be strangely ironic.
In At the British war cemetery, Bayeux, Charles Causley writes about the ‘five thousand’ dead, buried at the cemetery that the title indicates. The poem has a very ordered structure echoing the structured and orderly lines upon lines of graves and gravestones at a war cemetery supported later by referring to the dead as in ‘geometry’ of sleep. Grigson’s poem, however, is much less straightforward and uses a combination of enjambmen...