H is for Hawk Flashcards
‘“Don’t want you going home with the wrong bird”’
It foreshadows what ends up happening later in the text
‘thump’
- It is an onomatopoeia
- It builds tension, making the hawk seem powerful and violent
‘the box shook, as if someone had punched it, hard, from within’
It makes the hawk seem violent and powerful and shows the anticipation and fear of Macdonald
‘to keep the hawk from fearful sights. Like us’
- It is irony as it juxtaposes the violent thumping
- This shows Macdonald’s compassion for the bird and her understanding of what it is going through
‘Another hinge untied. Concentration. Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box’
- They are short sentences
- They help to build tension and drama for this terrifying beast
‘another thump. And another. Thump’
- It is repetition
- It continues to build tension and anticipation
‘The last few seconds before a battle’
- It is a hyperbolic metaphor
- It represents her anticipation and the tension building up
‘chaotic clatter of wings and feet and talons and a high pitched twittering and its all happening at once’
- Alliteration in chaotic clatter
- Polysyndetic listing
- Both represent how overwhelming and chaotic the moment of the hawk leaving the box is
‘enourmous, enourmous’
- It is repetition, as well as there being italics on the second enourmous
- It adds to the chaos and the feeling of being overwhelmed
What does the large standalone second paragraph show?
The utter non-stop chaos
‘a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury’
- A metaphor comparing sunlight to water
- These things are very unlike eachother, so to compare them adds to the chaos and the strangeness of the situation
‘She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary’
- Short sentences
- Shows how powerful and otherworldly the bird seems in the moment of chaos
‘For one, awful, long moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher shop’
- Simile comparing the hawk to a turkey
- It shows her sympathy for the hawk and how vulnerable it is when not flying
‘Her aviary was no larger than a living room’
- Short sentence
- Reflects her entrapment and emphasises Macdonalds newfound sympathy for the hawk
‘…and she can see everything: the point source glitter on the waves, a diving cormorant a hundred yards out; pigment flakes under was on the lines of parked cars…Everything startled and new-stamped on her entirely astonished brain’
- It is extensive listing, in juxtaposition to the short sentences right before
- The extensiveness of the list shows how open her world is compared to her ‘aviary’ which was ‘no larger than a living room, and how overwhelmed she must be feeling. This again emphasises Macdonald’s sympathy for the hawk
‘Through all this the man was perfectly calm. He gathered up the hawk in one practised movement, folding her wings, anchoring her broad feathered back against his chest’
- The verbs are active clauses
- It shows how in control of the situation the man is, juxtaposes the chaos earlier as well as the weakness and vulnerability of the hawk
‘All at once I loved this man, and fiercely’
Shows how much she has sympathy for the hawk as she loves him for his care and tenderness for the hawk, such as how he ‘fed her with scraps of meat held in a pair of tweezers’
‘Her beak was open, her hackles raised;’
Shows how despite the fact that the hawk seems threatened, Macdonald understands that it is overwhelmed, emphasizing not only how the hawk feels but also how Macdonald feels about the hawk
‘There was a brief intimation of a thin, angular skull under her feathers, of an alien brain fizzing and fuzing with terror’
- Fricative alliteration
- ‘Thin angular skull’
- Highlights the birds otherness and how otherwordly it seems to her
‘It was the wrong bird’
- Turning point (volta)
- Releases all the tension which has been built up and building on the irony of the foreshadowing in the first paragraph
‘Oh.’
- Short paragraph and interjection
- Reflects how disappointed she feels about the hawk not being hers
‘She came out like a victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.’
- Simile
- Focus’s in on the birds intense emotions and crazy behaviour, adding to how overwhelmed Macdonalds feels but also the sympathy she feels for the new bird
‘She was smokier, and darker, and much much bigger’
- Polysyndetic list
- Shows how overwhelming disappointed she is by the older bird
‘Instead of twittering, she wailed’
- Personification
- Shows sympathy to the hawk and she reminds Macdonald of herself
‘… and saw something blank and crazy in her stare. Some madness from a distant country’
- Personification as she is trying to relate to the bird by looking into its eyes
- However he words ‘madness’ and ‘distant country’ emphasise the otherness of this bird and show how Macdonald cannot connect with it
‘This is my hawk’ and ‘This isn’t my hawk’ and ‘But this isn’t my hawk’
- Repetition
- Shows how she tried to accept that it was her’s but couldn’t which shows how she cannot relate to the hawk in the same way as the first one
‘white-faced woman with wind-wrecked hair and exhausted eyes’
- Alliteration
- Shows how tired and distraught she is, as her father had just died and she is just looking for a distraction but cannot get the one she wants
‘as if she were in a seaside production of Medea’
- Allusion to a Greek play involving murder
- It juxtaposes the fact that it is a ‘sea-side’ production, which shows the serious nature her emotions but how silly she is making herself out to be
