Absence

Question 1

context

Answer 1

-1958
-modernism
-The Movement - poems known for blunt, to-the-point
-only woman in the movement

Question 2

form

Answer 2

-lyric poem
-quintets
-ababa
-iambic pentameter
-half rhyme (force, grass)
-enjambment - idea of rules being broken

Question 3

‘I visited the place where we last met.’

Answer 3

-1st person singular, then plural (juxtaposition showing change in status, reminding reader that poem is about someone who is not there anymore)
-deliberately vague language (place) - creates a universality with the grief that the narrator experiences

Question 4

‘There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.’

Answer 4

-vague (anything) - universal
-personification demonstrates what it is that the narrator is looking for (closure, to be told to move on)

Question 5

‘The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share’

Answer 5

-personification - demonstrates how narrator feels - sees birds as being insensitive and that they should be marking the occasion.
-heightened by hyperbole of ‘ecstasy’ - creates bitter and angry tone

Question 6

‘For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor.’

Answer 6

metaphor - her sense of stability is shaken up
-juxtaposes ‘gentleness’ - representative of monotonous things she’s been talking about’
-enjambment - could be about grief coming from the subconscious (Freud’s theory of consciousness)

Question 7

‘Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name.’

Answer 7

-triad represents gentleness that has been shaken up
-metaphor

Question 8

‘savage force’

Answer 8

-intensity of thinking of the person she lost creates this shaking