Arrivals, Departures ☆ Flashcards
1
Q
What is Arrivals, Departures about?
A
- Difficulty of noticing opportunities and the complexity of choice via extended metaphor of boat.
2
Q
What 3 ways is choice depicted as in Arrivals, Departures?
A
- Often go unnoticed.
- Overwhelming and distracting.
- Uncertain whether we have made the right ones.
3
Q
‘boats come sidling’
‘slackened engines gliding’
A
- Boat symbolic of choice and arrival of new opportunities.
- Opportunities can arrive without us even noticing, silently.
4
Q
‘we, barely recalled from sleep there,’
A
- Barely conscious to choices and opportunities that face us.
- ‘We’ : Collective human experience.
5
Q
‘(His bag of samples knocking at his knees)’
‘His advent blurted to the morning shore’
A
- Another metaphor for choice and arrival of opportunities.
- Salesman is depicted as clumsy, awkward and loud - depicts choice to be overwhelming and noisy in consuming our attention, intense and distracting.
6
Q
‘lowing in a doleful distance’
A
- Plosive alliteration - opportunities bring anguish - a future that we are unsure of causes unease and fear.
7
Q
‘Horny dilemmas at the gate once more’
A
- Refers to the horn of boat that brings choice, but also to the primitive, base desires that often influence choice.
8
Q
‘Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong’
A
- Personification embodies these choices - taunting and tempting us to the choices that will lead to discontent/disappointment.
9
Q
‘the outward bound’
Title : Arrivals, Departures
A
- Departing ship represents disappearing opportunities.
- Clipped title shows no sooner do opportunities arrive, disappear again. Rapid nature of them.
10
Q
‘nudged from comfort, never knowing’
A
- Slight but nagging uneasiness that we can never be sure if we’ve made the right choices/decision.
11
Q
‘never knowing’
‘blowing’
‘going.’
A
Rhyming final 3 lines intends to build tempo of poem, suggesting how opportunities rapidly disappear.
12
Q
A03 Arrivals, Departures
A
Belfast - boat (?)
