Effects Flashcards
STRUCTURE
- Rhyme scheme begins as inconsistent but becomes consistent towards the end, chaotic at beginning
- Ending : alternating rhyme and rhyming couplet : collecting memories, bereavement
- One stanza, 2 sentences : stream of consciousness - rush of thoughts, incongruent, lack of punctuation
“I held her hand”
- Synecdoche : fragility at the end showing her demise
- Structural parallel : cyclical emphasises the inevitability of death
“That was always scarred from chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait”
- Motif of permanence
- Asyndetic Listing : violent imagery provoked, element of care and love as though in pain always tries to look after speaker, shows the strength of a mothers love
- Housewife imagery
“That was raw, the knuckles reddened rough from scrubbing hard at saucepan, frying pan, cup and plate”
- Syndetic Listing : emphasises the everyday and the amount of chores she has to complete, highlights the laborious nature
- Motif of injury : shows how much the mother gives as a provider taking on a domesticated role
“Giving love the only way she knew, in each cheap cut of meat”
- Undermines the mothers knowledge
- Sardonic and condescending tone / rhyming couplets : patronising attitude to the mothers efforts, presents her as basic
- Love and affection is limited, product of her generation, outdated
“She cooked and we ate”
- Syntax creates separation between the speaker and the mother, sense of disconnect
- Power imbalance, presents her as authorative and controlling
- Monosyllabic : robotic and monotone, lack of affectionate relationship
“They had taken off her rings, the rings she kept once in her dressing-table drawer with faded snapshots, long-forgotten things (scent-sprays, tortoise-shell combs, a snap or two from the time we took a holiday ‘abroad’)
- Anadiplosis : symbolism of photography and camera
- Presents a loss of identity furthered through the parenthesis and asyndetic listing - possessions are taken away which are what define her and dismiss her identity and they no longer have meaning after hear death
- Archaic imagery - outdated and central to her
“He was dead.”
- Monosyllabic : brutalises the reality and refrains from euphemism showing the finality of death through the endstop
“Classic ladies model, gold strap - it was gone, and I’d never known her not to have that on”
- Old fashioned possession, unique to the mother, intrinsic and defining through tradition
- Condescension through the use of italics undermine his mother
- Listing of negators : grief and sense of loss, coming to terms and accepting the reality
“Watching soaps and game shows I’d disdain”
- Speaker sees the self as superior
- Lack of intelligence and pointless/futile activity
“Familiar flavours she said she preferred to whatever funny foreign stuff young people seemed to eat these days”
- Alliteration / direct speech : colloquial and embodies views of her period, dismissive and out of touch with reality, outdated and archaic.
- Represents the older generation to be old fashioned in ways, lacks progression
“Not all the weeks I didnt come, when she sat night after night and stared unseeing at the television”
- Repetition : emphasises the cyclical nature, presents her activities as monotonous and futile
- Structural parallel : emphasises a lack of progression, enters a dismal state
“Heaved herself upright, blinked and poured drink after drink, and gulped and stared”-
- Movement is presented as laborious and tiresome, lack of strength of the mother, trying to prevent her deterioration
- Polysyndetic listing : verbose and excessive emphasising her prolonged deterioration, inability to focus
- Regressed into a submissive, conformed state
“The scotch that, when he was alive, she wouldn’t touch, that was her way to be with him again”
- Anaphoric repetition : dynamic of the relationship was lacking when both alive, form to cope
- Emphasises the unhappiness of marriage at the time
“the nurses (who would steal anything, she said) and dreamt of when she was a girl”
- Parenthesis / direct speech : imaginative, emphasises the mothers struggle and condition
- Accusatory nature : presents her as delusional
