From The Antique Flashcards
1
Q
From The Antique
A
- ‘Antique = Ancient’ in Greek or Roman. Which translates to ‘From the Ancient’ - Implying the speaker is Pagan and therefore not a Christian.
2
Q
“It’s a weary life; it is; she said: - “
A
- Caesure - fatigue, sigh, mental exhaustion.
3
Q
“Doubly blank in a woman’s lot:”
A
- Expresses a nihalistic attitude towards the world and womanhood and how lost she would feel without her Christian faith.
- ‘Lot’ refers to a lottery, where a woma has drawn a ‘blank’ - been unlucky
4
Q
“I wish and I wish I were a man;”
A
- Hyperbolic phrase - exasperated.
- The ‘sh’ sound sounds like she’s being shushed. Very quiet line. Quite a taboo thing to say during this era.
5
Q
“Or, better than any being, were not:”
A
- ‘Or’ - afterthought - naturalistic thoughts. Trail of thought of the speaker.
6
Q
“Were nothing at all in all the world,
Not a body and not a soul;”
A
- Her suffering runs so deep that not even death would satisfy her
- Religious undertone
- Semantic field of religion - Holy Trinity
7
Q
“Not so much as a grain of dust
Or drop of water from pole to pole.”
A
- ‘Dust to dust’ - prayer. Rejecting her religion as she doesn’t wish to be dust.
- How little of her is left on earth
- Natural imagery of ‘dust’ and ‘water’ = opposites which symbolise that there is no state of being in which the speaker feels happy in
8
Q
“Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons would go and come;”
A
- Alliteration, and informality (wag)
- Collocation - inversion of the phrase ‘Come and go’ = life goes on
- Repetition = she believes the wave of feminism won’t change anything
9
Q
“Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.”
A
- The natural world is separate form the existance of humankind.
- Nothing will change, nothing has changed since before.
- Nature is able to adapt. She believes humans can’t.
- Beauty of life she wants to leave behind
10
Q
“None would miss me in all the word,
How much less would care or weep:”
A
- Wave of loneliness
- Contrading herself because no one would cry over losing a person who never existed in the first place.
11
Q
“I should be nothing, while all the rest
Would wake and weary and fall asleep.”
A
- Euphemism for death.
- Alliteration of ‘W’ symbolise emptiness and vastness. So much that life has to offer, but for her none of this is providing her pleasure.
- Suicide - mortal sin. Most tragic and unforgiving sin. Blasphemous. Unnacceptable for woman in this society to be rejecting these societal and religious views.
- Cyclical repetition of ‘weary’ - shows the ongoing cycle of life and its inescapability. Life goes on and on with or without people. Sense of finality.
12
Q
When was this poem written?
A
1854
13
Q
How old was Rossetti when she wrote this poem?
A
24
14
Q
Context behind this poem:
A
- She wrote it 4 years after she ended her engagement with James Collinson
- Also the year her father died (who she was extremely close to)
15
Q
What is reflected in her poem?
A
- This poem reflects her conflict inside led by religious mania
- You can detect a melancholy seeping into her work from her experience of romantic loss, as well as a cynicism about woman’s place in the world as she grows into adulthood
- Grief enters her work in a more substantial way.
