Kamikaze Flashcards
brief summary?
-a daughter is reflecting on the life of,and her relationship with her father who was a kamikaze pilot in the second world war.her father turned back and did not carry on his suicide mission.he was shamed by and isolated from his community.for not dying for his country.
context?
-british poet
-war based in germany in ww2 and japan was brought in 1940
-japans military attitudes were founded on codes of honour and self sacrifice.
-public shame on their return
structure?
Kamikaze is written in seven, six-line
stanzas
. The poem does not rhyme and has no regular rhythmic pattern, though most lines have three or four
stresses
. This style, together with the regular stanza structure, allows the story to be told simply, letting the tragedy and emotion shine through, but allowing readers to make up their own minds about events in the poem.
One notable feature of the poem’s structure is that it is composed of only three sentences and contains only three full-stops, perhaps reflecting the idea of a story being told orally. The first sentence runs over five stanzas, as we are told about what the pilot can see from the cockpit. We are therefore given a lot of detail, allowing us to imagine more exactly the circumstances of the pilot’s difficult decision.
“her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword”
-sybilence of “s” sound creates peace, this mirrors the peace he is meant to find within death
-“sunrise” symbolises japan and symbolises divinity, meeting god
-water is a symbol of purity, he is purifying himself spiritually, and for a christian audience it symbolises baptism, being reborn as a hero
-embarked, shows the sight of the grandfathers boat and how it persuades him not to kill the men, also reminds him of the family he will lose
“like a huge flag waved first one way, then the other in a figure of eight”
-fishes symbolise life, the life he doesnt want to give up
-the flag represents patriotism, the honour to die for your country,your flag
-figure of 8 symbolises infinity, on one hand he would life forever as a hero, but it also symbolises the eternal death
-figure of 8 returns on itself, reflecting how the pilot will turn back from him mission
-according to his daughter this is the moment he changed his mind
“the loose silver of whalebait and once a tuna,the dark prince,muscular and dangerous”
-“loose silver” allusion to the biblical description of the betrayal of jesus by judas for silver, this shows an idea of loose morality
-whitebait symbolises his betrayal of his country just as judas betrayed jesus
-tuna could signify the japanese royal family who are condemning these men to sacrifice themself for their country and emperor
-equally could symbolise the act of protest the father committed, a positive way of looking at what hes done
“only we children still chatted and laughed, till gradually we too learned to be silent”
-chatted and laughed is the natural human reaction to having your father back
-garland then introduces a line break for a new stanza till we get the volta”we too…”
-gradually shows how unnatural it was for the children to disown their own father, the japanese culture at the time is doing something painful
-the fact that they learned it shows once again it to be unnatural
“and sometimes,she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die”
-wondered shows how the daughter has not talked to her father about the decision, the memory may be too painful to talk about
-last line suggests that he has died emotionally within the family, would he have rather died as a hero of his nation or died ostracized from society
why has garland made the chronology of whose talking complicated
Structure
- to mirror how complex and damage culture can be
-message of hope about how a country recover from war, through the generations
-could reference how japan recovered form the bombings meaning the father recovered
Form
-each stanza is 6 lines long
-written in free verse
-feels like natural speak
-makes it feel like a narrative with a moral at the end
-the lack of form could also signify the family denied the father of his form as a father
quotes
-“and sometimes,she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die”
-“the loose silver of whalebait and once a tuna,the dark prince,muscular and dangerous
-“like a huge flag waved first one way, then the other in a figure of eight”
-“only we children still chatted and laughed, till gradually we too learned to be silent”
-“her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword”
