The divide between the external and the internal is one that poets have always sought to breach. The enigma of mind and emotion has been one that seemed almost impossible to convey truthfully in line and verse; a thought is too fleeting to capture, an emotion too deep to describe. Despite this writers have continued in their quest to give voice to the silent interior existence of humanity, though few have excelled at expressing thought through words and amongst these few, Elizabeth Jennings finds her place.

Throughout her work, Jennings explores the human condition in all its guises, giving subjects such as love , family, art and religion her own individual treatment . Each poem is an interior monologue, a thought isolated and explored in a frozen moment of time; each viewed with almost clinical detachment, yet described with words of such simplicity and clarity, that the experience is brought to life again with the reader intimately involved. This exploration of self through memory, reflection and calm acceptance adds power and realism to her expressed emotions. She simply describes what she sees, layering her perceptions wi

The stunning imagery in this poem, combined with the unusual rhyme scheme between the stanzas and with no rhyme within, makes this poem extremely striking and creates a sense of tightness and constraint beneath the verse.

th her external sensations and internal desires, creating a subtextual complexity to her otherwise uncomplicated words. Yet, what truly makes Jennings stand out amongst her contemporaries is not how she explores self and sensation, but the parts of self that she chooses to study; the most terrifying aspects of mind and emotion such as death, loneliness and depression. Pain and suffering are all an integral part of the human psyche and are often described as the 'human condition', yet for many writers these subjects are almost taboo as they are considered nigh on impossible to portray with true accuracy. With sublime understatement, Jennings creates these isolated environs to great effect in her poetry dealing with illnesses both mental and physical such as " A Mental Hospital Sitting-Room ", " Night Garden of the Asylum " and "Patients". She explores this subject through the eyes of the sufferer, drawing on her real-life experiences of mental illness and pain of which these poems are a record.

In " A Mental Hospital Sitting-Room ", the poet creates a prolific sense of despair and hopelessness;

The only real difference between the two states is that here the suffering is more ordered, more structured, more easily understood and this is conveyed through the language, which reflects these sentiments through the manipulation of form and rhyme which was absent from its predecessors. It has a regular pattern of half and full rhymes running through it's whole, and Jennings utilises rhetorical devices such as tricolons and synaesthesia for impact and emphasis of both the emotional and physical elements of her pain;

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Approximate Word count = 1415
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)