Born Yesterday ☆ Flashcards
Title of ‘Born Yesterday’
- Refers to a recently born infant (ie. Sally Amis)
- Refers to sense of foolish naivety - those mindlessly conforming to society’s generic dreams are foolish and ignorant.
What A03 might the epigraph ‘For Sally Amis’ link to?
Sally Amis was daughter of Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s fellow Movement writer and fellow friend. Movement writing deep rooted in everyday reality, rational and unsentimental.
‘Tightly-folded bud’
- Metaphor, connotes beauty and purity
- So far protected from harmful societal pressures and expectations.
- Potential
‘I have wished you something
None of the others would
Not the usual stuff’
- ‘I’ separates his personal views from generic societies.
- Vague, colloquial and informal language - unimportance of society’s hopes as lack depth and meaning.
‘About being beautiful’
‘Or running off a spring Of innocence and love’
- Plosive alliteration: Dismissive and condescending tone to reject shallow and generic ideas.
- Ridicules stereotypical expectations/cliched image of young womanhood as foolish/reductive.
‘And should it prove possible
Well, you’re a lucky girl’
- ‘Should’ : Deeply skeptical about whether such dreams are achievable, and if so, that they’ll lead to happiness.
- Caesura = tone of hesitation/uncertainty
- ‘lucky girl’ - hollow and cliché phrase to imply any female whose identity is defined by ‘innocence or love’ are anything but lucky.
‘But if it shouldn’t then’
Volta in S2 shifts from society’s hopes for her, to his.
‘May you be ordinary’
‘An average of talents’
‘Not ugly, not good-looking, Nothing uncustomary’
- Less forceful/insistent tone - his hopes are less demanding than society’s.
- Repeated negators - unconventional hopes where contentment is found in mediocrity, not defined by what possess, but what we don’t. Free from external pressures.
‘To pull you off your balance’
- Metaphor. Pursuing excellence and defining life via society’s hopes leads to discontent and disorder.
‘skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasised, enthralled’
- Asyndetic listing of his specific hopes.
‘Skilled’ = Hardworking/Dedicated.
‘Flexible’ = Open/Willing to change/adapt.
…enthralled
Catching of happiness is called’
- Free verse, but then rhyming couplet - resolution - by being alive to all life offers can we be happy - presented as an illusive/mysterious force (catching)
- Concludes happiness is difficult/uncertain, and pursuing as a goal is foolish. Live life on own terms and hopefully follows.
Rhyme Scheme:
- Irregular. Doesn’t want her to have a ‘regular’ life - wishes free from societal expectations, like unstructured rhyme scheme.
