Eden Rock Flashcards
quote about Familial Love + Death/Age
“They beckon to me from the other bank”
-Third person plural pronouns distances speaker from parents
-“Beckon” relates to temptation & persuasion, referencing reuniting family & is a positive embrace.
-familial love is portrayed as transcendent, not confined to boundaries of life & death. The speaker’s reunion with his deceased parents emphasises the boundlessness of their bond - love persists beyond physical existence.
-reunion at Eden Rock symbolises the cycle of life & death - speaker’s preservation of parents in their youth reflects timeless nature of love & memory, despite passage of time.
quote about Nature?
“they are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock”
-vague & non-specific - plural pronoun “they” makes it sound as though they could be many people waiting for him, evoking the first ideas of the afterlife we see in the poem
-“Eden” = biblical reference to garden of Eden - it connotes paradise, conjuring ideas of the afterlife & perhaps his want to be united with them
context
Charles Causley (1917-2003) was born in Launceston, Cornwall. An only child, Causley was only 7 when his father died. He may be talking about his own parents in ‘Eden Rock’, which was published in 1988.
summary
1) The narrator imagines that his parents are both young again - his mother is 23 and his father is 25.
They’re both on the bank of a stream and his mother is preparing a picnic - it’s an idyllic scene.
2) The narrator is on the opposite bank to his parents, and they encourage him to cross the river to join them.
3) The setting may be based on a real memory, or it may be an imagined scene of the time before the narrator was born or when he’s near death - his parents could be beckoning him to join them in life, or in the afterlife.
form
FORM - The poem is made up of five stanzas, mostly four lines long and nearly every line has ten syllables - this regular structure reflects the steady nature of the narrator’s relationship with his parents.
The final line is separated from the rest of the stanza - this could emphasise the narrator’s current separation from his parents, or it could show that he has now crossed the stream and is looking at what’s beyond. The poet mainly uses half-rhymes, which create a gentle, natural rhythm.
structure
STRUCTURE - In the first three stanzas the narrator affectionately describes his parents, showing his love for them. In the last two stanzas, his parents turn their attention to him and encourage him to join them.
language about memory
LANGUAGE ABOUT MEMORY - The narrator uses childhood memories to create a vivid scene.
The beautiful and peaceful descriptions of his parents reflect how special his childhood is to him.
language about light
LANGUAGE ABOUT LIGHT - References to light and the colour white may suggest a heavenly setting.
ordinary language to contrast
LANGUAGE ABOUT ORDINARINESS - Specific details such as the “H.P. Sauce bottle” show the narrator’s nostalgia for the details of everyday life when he was a child. The use of ordinary language reflects how life was simple and uncomplicated back then and shows the narrator’s fondness for this time.
