Age ☆ Flashcards
1
Q
Summary of Age:
A
- Reflecting on life experiences
- Reflecting on what they will leave behind - legacy as approaching death.
2
Q
‘My age fallen away like white swaddling’
A
- Simile
- Approaches death lacking the safety and structure of life.
- Once innocent and pure - as age, less innocent as corrupted by complexity and difficult of life.
3
Q
‘Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.’
A
- Metaphor : Unable make sense of life experiences, abstract nature of memories are vast and elemental, but difficult to distinguish/relate to who he is now.
4
Q
‘I bend closer’
A
- Desperation to make sense of his life.
5
Q
‘A lighted tenement scuttling with voices’
A
- Metaphor
- Life is desperate and demanding, erodes element of our humanity.
6
Q
‘O you tall game I tired myself with joining!’
A
- Metaphor - Life is a vast and difficult competition that exhausts those who participate.
7
Q
‘I wade through you like knee-level weeds’
A
- Simile
- As age, life itself becomes difficult and less enjoyable (wade)
- Face unavoidable and unwanted hardship.
8
Q
‘dear translucent bergs: Silence and space’
A
- Perspective now defined by the silence and isolation, but gains no greater perspective from the quiet. Welcomes the quiet (dear).
- Vast and largely concealed - achieves little clarity on the life he lived.
9
Q
What is the second stanza of Age about?
A
- Speaker considers what he’s left with, and the legacy in how he’ll be remembered.
10
Q
‘By now so much has flown From the nest here of my head that I needs must turn To know what prints I leave’
A
- Natural imagery
- As age, become redundant and unneeded, like a nest.
11
Q
‘whether of feet, Or spoor of pads, or a bird’s adept splay’
A
- Listing
- All destined to leave a legacy that will exist in 1 of 3 forms:
‘feet’ of Hunter - defined by constant and relentless pursuits.
‘spoor’ - evading a life of restriction and entrapment.
‘adept splay’ - ideal, freedom, above the superficial lives of ones like Hunter.
12
Q
In the final lines of Age, what does the speaker conclude?
A
- Speaker does not suggest which legacy he will leave behind, implies that those after us will form judgements about the lives we lived, not ourselves.
