Havisham Flashcards
Beloved sweetheart bastard
Plosive B’s ~ spat out, harsh, angry tone. Emphasises disgust and hatred.
Non sentence ~ straight to the point and makes her opinion on him direct and clear.
Oxymoron ~ shows her change in feelings towards him and opens and sets the poem with an angry tone.
Love’s / hate behind a white veil
Enjambement ~ suggests there was a time between love and hate where she did love him.
Oxymoron ~ shows her change in feelings. What was once love is now bitter loathing. The two contrasting words emphasise this point.
Word choice ~ ‘behind’ gives connotations of hiding and avoiding the truth. This suggests she is burying her head in the sand instead of facing up to what happened to her.
A red balloon bursting in my face
Alliteration/plosives ~ emphasise on the sadness and heartbreak that she feels.
Symbolism ~ the balloon symbolises her heart being shattered and all the time and effort she put into the relationship being thrown right back at her.
Symbolism ~ the colour red is symbolic for anger and rage + love, shows her conflicting emotions.
I’ve got dark green pebbles for eyes
Symbolism ~ green is the colour of envy. This suggests she is jealous of all that she could have had, but doesn’t.
~ the eyes are said to be the window to the soul and by comparing them to pebbles, she is saying that her soak is cold, hard and dark.
Spinster.
One word sentence ~ shows isolation and loneliness, this reflects her inner feelings.
Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.
Word choice ~ ‘only’ suggests that manny other aspects of her and her life have been shattered including her confidence and her dreams of marriage.
Stuttering ~ shows that she’s loosing control over her emotions, much like she lost control of what was happening within her relationship.
About
Based on the character of Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ ‘Great expectations’. She is jilted at the alter by the man she loves and is then left to live life as a sad, lonely, man-hating spinster.
The poem is narrated by her and notes her negative feelings towards love, relationships and men.
Themes
Love Hate Loss Relationships Revenge
