A Wife In London Flashcards
Poet
Thomas Hardy
Structure/Form
Split into two parts:
I – Tragedy
II – Irony
Each part contains 2 stanzas of 5 lines each. Written in the present tense.
The poem has a regular ABBAB rhyme scheme, yet it doesn’t have a ‘sing-song’ quality which reflects the Irony that there is now nothing to celebrate because he died before his wife read his letter.
Context
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and author, who often focussed on tragedy in his writing. Hardy wrote the poem in 1899. In the poem, he is referring to the Boer War, which was fought in South Africa, between 1880-1881. The Boers were farmers who rebelled against British rule in the Transvaal in northern South Africa, in a bid to re-establish their independence. The references to the thick fog tell us that London was covered in thick fog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This fog was the result of smoke and mists coming from the sea (due to industry and war).
The street-lamp glimmers cold
The oxymoron used in ‘glimmers-cold’ represents life and death. It is also a metaphor to describe the light or life going out of the soldiers as they die. The street lamp reflects the wife giving up hope as she waits for her husband and coincides with the fact that her husband has just died.
She sits in the tawny vapour
Pathetic Fallacy is used to reflect the mood of the wife, and also the City of London, as the country goes to war. Tawny means brown, which suggests the air is polluted by warfare, just as her life is. ‘Sits’ is also a very passive verb, which suggests the wife feels helpless, isolated and trapped in the house during the war. Alliteration = emphasis???
Like a waning taper
Simile is used to compare life to a thin candle that is burning out/dying out. Hardy is trying to emphasise that life is delicate and can end at any time. The assonance of the verb ‘waning’ is powerful because it describes the slowly diminishing flame of the candle (‘taper’), which represents life dying out.
That the City lanes have up rolled
This image represents the fact up the built up City has been destroyed and uprooted due to the war. The verb ‘uprolled’ precisely describes the way in which the roads have collapsed and rolled up, due to bombing. Everything feels as if it is closing in around the wife and she is stuck in this lonely existence
In the summer weather
Change of season – pathetic fallacy is used to show happiness and romance at the couple being reunited after war. The semantic field of summer suggests warm weather, which represents their love and is a stark contrast to the weather described in stanza I.
New love
The adjective ‘new’ suggests that the relationship between husband and wife will be created afresh; learning to love each other again on being reunited after the war. The noun ‘love’ is emotive language, which refers to deep, intense attachment felt between husband and wife, which will basically have to be renewed or rediscovered when they are back together.
He-has-fallen-in the far south land
Punctuation reflect the way telegrams were transmitted, or her intakes of breath or sobs. ‘fallen’ is a nice way of describing that her husband has been shot down dead. In other words, to soften the blow to such terrible news.
