Now try to write your own short onomatopoeic poem using some or all of the onomatopoeic words from the list you made earlier and the words you found in the stanza from ‘The Bells’.
Responding Personally to Poetry
William Wordsworth once said that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overfl ow of powerful feelings’. In other words, it is an emotional reaction that cannot be controlled. Not only does poetry express a poet’s feelings, it can also make the reader emotional.
When you are reading a poem, think about how it makes you feel and how
you relate to it. This is called personal response and it helps you to relate to the poem and the poet’s experience.
Write to Comment on What You Have Read [W3] Write a personal response to the poem ‘The Bells’, explaining how it made you feel.
Sample Answer (Higher Level)
The poem ‘The Bells’ made me feel energetic and a lit le anxious. Because the poem is full of very powerful descriptions, many of which use onomatopoeia, I felt quite energised while reading it. For example, when the poet described the sound of ‘alarum’ bells ‘screaming out in fright’ and how they ‘shriek, shriek’, I could almost hear these sounds and it made me feel very awake and alert.
The last four lines made me feel quite anxious. While I was impressed with the combination of the rhyming onomatopoeic words ‘twanging’ and ‘clanging’, the harsh ‘a’ sound in both words conjures up a frightening image. Combined with the use of the word ‘danger’ in the fi nal line, I found the overall eff ect was that it left me feeling a lit le bit disturbed, although I was also very impressed by how powerful the poem was.
