Kamikaze Flashcards
“Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurisword”
Sibilance - (repeated’s’sound) gives it a sign of peace and this reflects to the peace of death, sunnise symbolises meeting god, he is purifing himself.
He is going to realise they enemy is Just like him his fathers boat will remind him how he does not want to
fight.
Like a huge flag waved first one way then the other in a figure of eignt.”
she is trying to imagine his fathers experiances looking down at Shoals of fish which symbolise life and how he does not want to give up his life through suicide.
Simile - the flag represents patrism, this creates a contrast of the fish and life and the sacrafice he has to make patriotically for his country and the flag
The figure of eight (which can also be seen as a sign of infinity) represents now it is not a one way Journey and how he will change and come back. This is were he bigins to change his mind accoroing to the daughter
“The loose silver unitebait and once a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous
the choice of language calling them “LOOSE SIVER” is a biblical Allusion as silver has aways been seen as a sign of betrayal. The whitebait symbolise his betrayal of his country how Judas betrayed Jesus
“only we children still chattered and laughed”
“till graduany we too learned to be silent”
They loved there father grateful to have him back and that’s the normal human reaction, we then go into a new stanza. The word “gradually” shows how long it’s taken the children to disown there father. This implies that they are Doing somethng wro learned something snows the unaturally au this invites us toimagine that when the child grous up sheis now reflecting anthatdicion was wrong
“And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered
Which had been the better way to die”
The phrase ‘he must have wondered’ shows us that the daughter never asked him because the memory had been to bad
He has never been accepted both emotionally the daughter has accepted him because she is telling this story
The poem is about hope and how the culture does not have to look about life
Beatrice Garland
Garland lives in London and works as a clinician and researcher for the NHS alongside writing poetry.
‘Kamikaze’ was published in 2013 as part of her first poetry collection, The Invention of Fireworks.
Form
The poem is mostly narrated in the third person using reported speech of the pilot’s daughter, but her voice is heard directly in the later stanzas. The absence of the pilot’s voice shows that he’s been cut off from society, and the use of the third person emphasises the distance between pilot and daughter.
Structure
The first five stanzas form one sentence which covers an account of the
pilot’s flight as the pilot’s daughter imagines it. The end of the sentence represents the plane landing, and the final two stanzas deal with the fallout of the pilot’s actions.
Irony
There are ironic reminders of how the pilot has abandoned his mission. The way he’s treated when he returns to his family is ironic because they act as if he’s dead, even though he chose not to die.
Natural imagery
Similes, metaphors and detailed descriptions are used to emphasise the beauty
and power of nature. The pilot’s daughter hints that this beauty was one of the main triggers for his actions.
Direct speech
The addition of direct speech makes the poem seem more personal.
Hearing the daughter’s voice emphasises the impact of war on a specific family.
Her father embarked at sunrise
This creates a sense of a journey , but the title seems to suggest that it will be a journey of death
