Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album Flashcards
STRUCTURE
- Half Rhyme but regular
- Quintains
- Alternates between iambic and trachaic pentameter : sense of separation between stressed and unstressed syllables
“All your pages Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!”
- Exclamative : represents her youth as desirable
- Juxtaposition creates a stark contrast between the description of the woman, idolises her creating visual imagery of the past.
- Sense of voyerism
- Highlights beauty and purity at youth which is undermined with age
“Too much confectionary, too rich: I choke on such nutritious images”
- Anaphoric Repetition : motif of consumption and overindulgence, claustrophobic and suffocating.
- Motif of observation, indulgent
“My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose”
- Motif of consumption : greed of the speaker and avarice, consumes the images as they are enticing
- Irony : regimented and forced, done in order to present the self and organised, images not a true representation of women - artificial nature
- Critiques obsession of the past
“In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat”
- Child-like imagery : highlights the naivity of the woman, connotes innocence, youth is desirable
“Or furred yourself, a sweet girl graduate; Or lifting a heavy headed rose”
- Anaphoric repetition : Emphasises the change in time and ageing
- Maturity increased, romantic imagery provoked and trochee
- Provides a documentation of her maturity
“You strike at my control”
- Tone : formal and controlling
- Syntax of pronouns : creates a physical separation between the speaker and the girl
“These disquieting chaps who loll at ease about your earlier days”
- Juxtaposition between eloquent vocabulary and the colloquialism : clique, loathing
- Seen as intimidating and forceful in nature
- Obsessive of women : predatory imagery provoked for women in their youth, element of jealousy provoked
“Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole”
- Negator : condescending tone and judgemental
- Derogatory and undermining of women, viewed for class and supposed to be eloquent
“Dull days as dull” / “hold-it smiles as frauds” / “not censor blemishes”
- Simile + negators emphasises the facetious, unrealistic expectations of womens appearance
- Presents the reality, the past doesn’t capture the reality within a picture, unrealistic
- Undermines the expectations of women
“That is a real girl in a real place”
- Anaphoric repetition
- Irony : not real as it is in the past and no longer tangible
- Snapshot of the past - unrealistic
- Tone : undermines women for being present in the now
“Those flowers, that gate, these misty parks and motors, lacerate simply by being you”
- Syndetic listing : presents the longing the speaker has for the past
- Presents the past as desirable, obsessed with the woman’s previous appearance
“Contract my heart by looking out of date”
- Juxtaposition : legal imagery provoked creates a sense of formality which contrasts against something of love and adoration
- Undermines the idea of romance, forced and stigmatised
- Motif of food paralleling the previous imagery of her being viewed as sweet and desirable which she has now expired because of her age showing she is no longer desirable
“We cry” / “Our grief” / “We yowl”
- Motif of despair : coping mechanism
- Repetition / Epistrophe : emphasises that the speaker views the previous appearance of the woman as deceased undermining and objectifying women purely for their looks
- Collectives : repeated to emphasise the affect it has to all, emphasises a worldwide desire
“To wonder if you’d spot the theft of this one of you bathing”
- Anaphoric repetition: juxtaposes the previous sad imagery and provokes disturbing
- Violating and overstepping : how far desire may go
