Breathless by Wilfred Noyce

            I believe that Noyce is writing this poem for himself. This poem is a way for him to express his feelings of desperation and loneliness and get those feelings out of his system and continue on his journey. Noyce shows despair in the poem, he feels hopeless, lost in the mountain. He uses short sentences and monosyllabic words to express his physical difficulty, his breathlessness, and at the same time to link back to the title, Breathless.The use of rhyming words in some lines but not others shows the disordered state of mind that the author is in. However, this poem does not only focus on the poet's physical difficulty on scaling the mountain, but also his emotional turmoil and the conflict within himself. We can see clearly that Noyce is in two states of minds, the first one being his feeling of desperation, his wanting to give up. The second is his determination to finish climbing the mountain. These two different feelings of Noyce forms an emotional struggle. We can clearly see hints of the first thought all throughout the poem, when Noyce is questioning himself in line 6 "why at all?" about the reason he's climbing the mountain, in lines 9 to 12, Noyce is thinking about holidays, thinking of a easy way out, and this shows that he wants the whole journey to be easier, and that he doesn't want to continue anymore because it's too hard. In line 36, "dragging feet" indicates his extreme weariness and that he doesn't want to move forward anymore. However, on the other hand, Noyce also expresses his view to go on in the poem. In line 17 to 20 and 29 to 32 the poet tries to mechanise his body to force himself to move forward. The phrases "grind breath", "once more then on" and "don't look up, count steps done" shows that the poet is trying to ignore his body's demands and forcing himself to continue forward, step by step. Although the poet has hints of self encouragement in the poem, he still feels pessimistic and negative, and these negative thoughts override the encouraging ones, as we can see when the poet finds the "stone no nearer".