Kamikaze Flashcards
Language
similes: ‘the little fishing boats/ strung out like bunting’; the ‘dark shoals of fishes’ ‘arcing in swathes/ like a huge flag waved first one way/ then the other’-shows how closely he was attached to these; imagery here of ‘bunting’ and a ‘flag’ has connotations of celebration
anguage of colours: ‘green-blue translucent sea’, ‘flashing silver’, ‘pearl-grey’, ‘cloud- marked’, ‘black’, ‘silver’, ‘dark’- makes us more sympathetic to someone as conveys clear sense of beauty of the scene
Multi-sensory language in stanza 5-helps convey the beauty of the scene he remembers from his childhood and makes us sympathetic towards someone who did not want to die and leave this all behind. Shows the powerful pull of nature on the pilot towards life
he almost dehumanised image of the pilot’s ‘shaven head full of powerful incantations’ and ‘she thought’ in the first line of the next stanza-indicates the difference between the way her father was not expected to ‘think’, but the fact that she can now ‘think’
Form/structure
free verse, but regular stanza lengths of 6 lines each-free verse allows for a ‘story-telling’ voice, as if this is a well-worn story, told possibly many times over, showing its significance to the family, but also suggesting that it is a story told in other families too
Mixture between 3rd person narration and 1st person narrative-the daughter and her children – firstly to show how significant this ‘failure’ was to the whole family – including down the generations; secondly, as it distances the reader from the Kamikaze pilot, ensuring he has not only been sentenced to silence by his family but has also been silenced by the poem itself – we never hear his voice
past tense narrative-gives a sense of distance to the experience of the pilot
At beggining of setting off to die and end died in hid own identity
First 4 stanza about power of human last 4 stanza about power of nature
