Basking Shark and Assisi Flashcards
Basking Shark and Assisi
Both snapshot poems that describe an encounter the poet had with something significant: the shark and the eeggar.
Both learning experiences for the poet
events that made him think deeply about the nature of man. They show the poet having a moment of understanding. In Basking Shark the poet says that when the water settles the ‘spring is all the clearer’ and this implies his thoughts about man’s origins have also become clearer. In Assisi the poet sees through the hypocrisy of the priest when he writes ‘I understood the explanation and the cleverness’.
Both raise significant questions for the reader:
The ‘who’s the monster?’ question in Basking Shark is similar to the question at the heart of Assisi. Although the dwarf is depicted as ugly, with his ‘hands on backwards’, we ask who’s really the ugly character (the monster) in the poem. In Assisi the monster is the priest who ignores the dwarf and patronises the ‘illiterate’.
Use of poetic sound techniques such as alliteration
In Assisi – ‘sat slumped like a half filled sack’ helps us imagine the noise of sawdust running out of an old stuffed toy, and in Basking Shark ‘sail after sail, the tall fin slid’ recreates the swishing noise of the shark cutting through the water. Both poems regularly use sibilants (the letter ‘s’) to recreate sound
Both poems depict the poet as being unsettled and uncomfortable.
In Basking Shark the poet is ‘displaced’ which suggests he has been jolted both literally and metaphorically. In Assisi the poet is uncomfortable about the way the tourists ignore the beggar: ‘they who had passed…’ The word ‘they’ suggests he doesn’t want to be associated with these tourists.
Both poems use negative imagery in a mocking way:
In Basking Shark the shark is described as a ‘room sized monster with a matchbox brain’ and in Assisi the tourists are depicted as being like chickens who are ‘clucking contentedly’ as they follow the priest around. The metaphors in both poems poke fun at their subject.
At the end of both poems the idea of transformation is explored
In Basking Shark the clumsy bulky ‘monster’ of the first stanza has been replaced by an elegant, graceful creature, which the poet compares to a ship sailing away: ‘sail after sail, the tall fin slid away and then the tail’. In Assisi the final stanza describes the beautiful inner person of the dwarf when the dwarf says ‘Grazie in a voice as sweet as a child’s’.
