Comparative Essay Sample: When You Are Old by William Bulter Yeats and the Sea by Eva Sallis

Within every text we have studied we engage ourselves with the concept of the complexity of human nature, emotion, and experience and how it creates human identity . It is a universal idea that not only connects us between ourselves, but the world and others. The poem When you are old by William Bulter Yeats (1893) and the short story The Sea by Eva Sallis (2005) are both  featured texts of this reading to write unit.These stories using a sea of techniques create stories that uncover themes of  unrequited romance, regretted heartbreak and trauma.  Both texts manifest idea’s of the complexity of human identity, human emotion, experience and how they shape us. These texts have highlighted and explored the multitude of elaborate emotions such as struggle, regret and love as well as traumatic experiences, and different kinds of change that can affect human identity and it’s part in human nature. 

Conceptual texts uncover a multitude of complex human emotions that any audience can relate to individually or share the experience with, these texts explore modern ideas of regret, grief, love and pride, and explain how each aspect designs the blueprint of who we are. In the short story The Sea, Eva Sallis creates a personal experience using countless techniques such as vivid imagery, sibilance and harsh alliteration that relates to the audience individually and breaks the barrier of common worldly issues. The story walks us through an Afghan man's tale of grief about losing his wife and child and how this experience changed his perspective and the way he sees the world.“He had the power to keep her in the house, to insist that she wore even gloves on the street, to recall her from university. He could demand her service. Demand her body. In the moment these things gave him a heightened pleasure.”  The powerful and arrogant tone conveys the pride he has or the power he feels knowing he can control his wife. The struggle of his emotions lead to be his downfall, the pride he feels blocks him from understanding his wife's feelings leading to the ultimate regret that shapes his new perspective on life.“He remembered suddenly when he first met Zahra he had mistaken her for a dead person- suddenly he was weeping in front of all the people. She was gone.” The foreshadowing irony reiterates how real the situation is and how badly it affects the main character, revealing the man's human nature. It’s human nature for our brain to jump from a joyful time like a first meeting, to losing someone. The product of losing someone has changed his prideful and superior exterior he felt in the past, now to a “weeping”  man that has been humbled by his wife’s death.This draws on how change can mould who we are from a prideful person to a humble man. Parts of the world are like this, and they believe this control is love. By reading this text the audience can connect to the issue of pride before love and relating social issues around the world that affect women this way, as well as individual women who believe pride and control is a byproduct of love.

The Story of The Sea also identifies how the connection of complex emotions link into the struggle of human identity and how it can shape the world, the individual and others. Eva Sallis pulls audiences attention through moment to moment sequences through scenes that create vivid imagery that places us in the shoes of Abd the main character. In these mournfully but beautifully written scenarios we empathise with the struggle, conflict and trauma of this experience. In these textual experiences Sallis highlights the emotional insanity that can push them to do abnormal things whilst dealing with stress or trauma. “Then suddenly bucking shuddered underfoot, and water rushed about his knees and there was no boat, only a ravenous sucking sound and seething water” the repetitiveness of the letter “s'' uses the technique type of alliteration of sibilance, the letter s is known as the letter of evil. The imagery creates a picture of the way he experienced the downfall of the deck losing his wife and child also representing the ‘s’ alliteration in the way death took them. When the dock collapsed we can see the water rising and the way the experience shaped him through the vivid imagery.“ So fewl he closed his eyes and imagined turning dreamily to feel for Zarah- then opening his eyes again” This juxtaposed comparison between dreams and reality compliment the vivid imagery of the flashback, from the past to present we realise that the longing feeling of his wife has made his emotions cut himself out of reality in a way of dealing with his own trauma. His struggle, anger, sadness and despair has helped connect ourselves through the moments of losing someone, through fleeing moments audiences can empathise with the struggle, depression and anxiety of trying to move on without it becoming all you think about.

Between ourselves, the world and others, different types of texts express how experience can affect human identity and shape who we are and how we think. The greatest experiences come from the universal theme of Love and romance, for millennia we read and search through poems and tales of love. This theme of love also extends itself to different kinds of love, such as unrequited love, lost love, soulmate love, each story fitting to the person's experience and the way it changed them. The poem When you are Old by William Bulter Yeats explores the unrequited and reggeted kind of love, the youthful experience of first love and how his rejection shaped how he sees the world, himself and others. “When you are old and grey and full of sleep, nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look-” The symbolism of memories and dreamy use assonance of  the repetition o and ea which creates an euphony  which are pleasing euphoric words. Thus exploiting Yeats human nature of rejection and reminiscing. Looking through the past is symbolised as reading a book, meaning looking through the literature is like looking through your own mind about the past. Added the words by the fire when you're old and grey could mean when you’re older, this even implies close to death making it even more of a link to human nature to look back on your life before death. The author is presenting the theme of unrequited love kind of regret. Which shows itself as a part of the complex human nature that everyone can relate to.