Look, Stranger! Flashcards
What is it highly reminiscent of?
Arnold’s Dover Beach - Victorian Pessimism
what does ‘leaping light for your delight discovers’ allude to
‘the cliffs of England stand/glimmering and vast’
Nicholas Jenkins
‘suggests a fragility and impermanence to England’s literal and metaphorical insularity’
Nicholas Jenkins on the cliff that ‘falls to the foam’
it is ‘happily fixed in an eternal, unhistorical present… from another perspective, though, that iconic white bulwark of friable chalk is inexorably crumbling under the assault of sea, time, history’
John Blair
‘Auden uses imperatives to attract attention’
England is superlatively delineated as a _________ ________ island of green fields, chalk cliffs, a shingle beach and contented human observers.
harmoniously interdependent
the poem’s close suggests a….
fragility and impermanence to England’s literal and metaphoric insularity
what is its rhythm?
iambic but with varying number of stresses and line lengths, with no particular rhyme scheme
internal rhymes?
‘wall/tall’ ‘light/delight’
para-rhymes
‘ledges’ / ‘lodges’
In muted, seemingly involuntary ways, the poem records the _______ intrinsic to the language of nationhood, a language never more assertive than in the face of imminent collapse’
ambivalence
The national ‘sign’ is always ____; the national space is never the autonomous realm that nationalist mythologizing desires.
unstable
Stan Smith:
‘the cliff that “falls to the foam” is from one persepctive happily fixed in an eternal, unhistorical present (always falling, but never falling). From another, the iconic site bulwark of friable chalk is inexorably crumbling under the assault of the sea, time, history’.
the poem is a ______ exercise in which he reveals his technical skill by using sound techniques and figurative language to reinforce his description of the scene
musical
________ and _______ of the l-sounds (leaping, light, delight)
alliteration, consonance
dental sounds
t & d sounds (light, delight, discovers)
long vowel sounds
‘leaping’ and ‘light’
the alliteration and consonance of l-sounds (leaping, light, delight) and the dental t- and d- sounds (light, delight, discovers) and the variation of long vowel sounds (‘leaping’ and ‘light’) creates a….
quick dancing effect which mimics the reflection of sunlight off waves.