Comparison of Patten's 'The Armada' and Duran's 'Coat' Anonymous 10th Grade

Like Duran’s poem 'Coat", Patten's ‘The Armada’ is written as an anecdote, and recounts a childhood memory of Patten’s mother. He writes about a time when he played with toy boats in a pond, and compares this to the death of his mother.

Like Duran, Patten writes in the past tense, creating a sense of time which separates both of the poets from their childhood, and the memories of their mothers. Patten opens his poem with the phrase ‘long, long ago’, which mimics the opening of a fairy-tale. This perhaps suggests that he longs for his childhood spent with his mother, as it is like a perfect fairy-tale, but also creates a dream-like tone, as it no longer feels real to him. However, the fact that he ends his poem with the same line creates the idea of a recurring cycle of life, and so the death of his mother brings the beginning of new life, and a childhood for someone else.

Unlike Duran, who is mostly passive and inactive in her poem, only ‘staying against’ her mother, Patten ‘launched a child’s armada across a pond. The use of the semantic field of war with the words ‘armada’ and ‘fortress’ suggests that, unlike Duran, who hid from life ‘behind’ her mother, Patten viewed life as a battle in which he was an active participant....