In the poem, 'Nettles', the poet uses the extended metaphor of his son falling into a nettle bed and himself chopping down the nettles so his son doesn’t get hurt again. The poet sees it as if the nettles are at war with his son, using a semantic field of words linked to the military, such as 'spears' and 'regiment of spite' to show this. This is an effective technique as it emphasises the speaker's protective feelings for his son and puts the poem into context as the poet actually experienced war first hand, so we understand why he feels the way he does. We also know that the father and son relationship is close, because the son came 'seeking comfort' from the father, something he wouldn’t have done unless there was a bond between them.
The alliteration in the line, 'I took my hook and honed the blade,' shows that the speaker is reacting emotionally to the incident as when you say the line out loud, it sounds quite fast and fluent, suggesting that he wasn’t wasting any time. Similarly, the poet omitted punctuation from line 9 through to 12, showing how his anger was taking over himself and he wouldn't stop until he had finished the job, just like there weren't any breaks in the sentence until it reached the full stop at the end. The way the father reacted could suggest that he felt…show more content… In this poem, the relationship is with father and son, we can instantly see that the bond is strong from the linguistic devices used but also how the stanzas are set out. There are no stanzas in this poem, it is written in one single, solid, which cleverly shows that there are no gaps in the poets relationship with his son, and it will be never-ending, as the writing never breaks up. This then links to the way the poet wrote, 'my son' at the start of both the first line and the last line, again showing that the relationship stays strong
