blank Flashcards
From Blank to Blank —A Threadless WayAllusion + ‘blanks’ = conceitRepetition + split tetrameter line slant rhymeI pushed Mechanicfeet —MetaphorVerb connotations To stop —orperish —oradvance —Alike indifferent —Dashesparallelism
→Theseus’ labyrinth but a maze of ‘blanks’ →conceit labyrinth rep meaninglessness of speaker’s psych. state →accen. by rep ‘blank’ + severing tetrameter line harnesses empty space at end of line to imply emptiness→‘threadless’ implies Sisyphean meandering / Slant rhymes defer acoustic expectation: sense of ends nearly arrived at but never realized.→→t/f speaker= alienated (protomodern)→Metaphor = despairing mental state →moving mechanically through life/going through motions in detached fashion→Verb ‘pushed’ = heaviness often seen poems re. despair (‘heft’ in Slant+ ‘boots of lead’ in Funeral)→sense of ‘pushing’ own feet = detachment from own body/experience →dashes rep speaker’s halting steps as they consider options (to stop, or to die, or to keep going) but polysyndeton + parallelism →numbing equivalence of each option (fatalism)→By end S1 speaker appears to suffer from a form of despair rooted in a feeling of meaninglessness which engenders a fatalistic attitude towards their existence
