A Half Built Boat In A Hayfield

Question 0

“Rye grass was silk and sea whose rippling was,
Too suave to rock it. Solid in the sun
It’s stiff ribs ached for voyages not begun.”

Answer 0

Iambic pentameter 3
Use of personification
Alliteration of ‘s’ sounds
Suggests abandoned boat, not completed/finished. Tools, equipment, pieces lying everywhere.

Question 1

“A cradle at a distance, of a kind,
Or making neat its pastoral scene
A carcass rotted and it’s bones picked clean”

Answer 1

Cradle suggests a small bed
Not in a complete sentence, no ‘it is’ for introduction purposes. Starts in note form.
Alliteration of ‘c’
Life and death emphasis, contrast same sound, same journey

Question 2

“The gathering word was not completed yet.
The litter of its own genesis lay around,
Sunk in the bearded sea or on the ground.”

Answer 2

Use of metaphors
Religious imagery is used
Suggests the boat is on the hay of the field.

Question 3

“Only when these clawed timbers could enclose,
Their own completing darkness would they be,
Phoenixed from It and phoenixed in to She

Answer 3

Oxymoron- “completing darkness”
Connotations of an enclosed blackness
Religious imagery, Phoenix reborn from its own ashes- in the bible

Question 4

“And fit then, as such noticing reveals,
To split her first wave open and explore,
The many ways that all lead down to one shore.”

Answer 4

“To split her first wave open” suggests like the Red Sea splitting in the Bible
Life and death- from travelling and exploring in a boat to ending up on a shore somewhere.
Life and death - exploring the wider world in different places to ending up in the same place as everyone else, in death.