Look, Stranger! Flashcards

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1
Q

What is it highly reminiscent of?

A

Arnold’s Dover Beach - Victorian Pessimism

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2
Q

what does ‘leaping light for your delight discovers’ allude to

A

‘the cliffs of England stand/glimmering and vast’

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3
Q

Nicholas Jenkins

A

‘suggests a fragility and impermanence to England’s literal and metaphorical insularity’

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4
Q

Nicholas Jenkins on the cliff that ‘falls to the foam’

A

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’

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5
Q

John Blair

A

‘Auden uses imperatives to attract attention’

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6
Q

England is superlatively delineated as a _________ ________ island of green fields, chalk cliffs, a shingle beach and contented human observers.

A

harmoniously interdependent

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7
Q

the poem’s close suggests a….

A

fragility and impermanence to England’s literal and metaphoric insularity

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8
Q

what is its rhythm?

A

iambic but with varying number of stresses and line lengths, with no particular rhyme scheme

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9
Q

internal rhymes?

A

‘wall/tall’ ‘light/delight’

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10
Q

para-rhymes

A

‘ledges’ / ‘lodges’

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11
Q

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’

A

ambivalence

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12
Q

The national ‘sign’ is always ____; the national space is never the autonomous realm that nationalist mythologizing desires.

A

unstable

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13
Q

Stan Smith:

A

‘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’.

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14
Q

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

A

musical

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15
Q

________ and _______ of the l-sounds (leaping, light, delight)

A

alliteration, consonance

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16
Q

dental sounds

A

t & d sounds (light, delight, discovers)

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17
Q

long vowel sounds

A

‘leaping’ and ‘light’

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18
Q

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….

A

quick dancing effect which mimics the reflection of sunlight off waves.

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19
Q

the pattern of stress on ‘wander’ and ‘river’, and on ‘swaying sound of the sea’…

A

conveys an idea of the changing volume of sound coming from the sea, and the continued whispering sound that it makes

20
Q

how old was Auden when he wrote this poem?

A

28 years

21
Q

What does M.H.Abrams call the poem?

A

‘an exuberant display of his early mastery over the resources of language’

‘a linguistic tour-de-force’

22
Q

Gerald Manley Hopkins’ influence?

A

emphatics sequences of stressed syllables and the

conspicuous patterning of speech sounds

23
Q

Hopkins’ poems hadn’t been published until 1918 although written in the High-Victorian time

A

only 18 years before on this island

24
Q

Abrams on Hopkins influence

A

‘Hopkins’ linguistic innovations captivated Auden’

25
Q

‘Look, Stragner’

A

the poet addresses himself directly to you, whom the poem thus posits as a fellow viewer of this vibrant scene

26
Q

the scene is _____ with sunlight and resonant with the sounds of ever moving _____,

A

drenched, water

27
Q

Abrams on the delight of lulling within this poem

A

‘Auden recovers for us on a complex level this lost primitive pleasure’

28
Q

the light in the repeated utterance of the elastic ‘l’s and the prominent evolution of other speech units from ‘leaping’ to ‘light’ to delight’ to discovers’

A

Auden matches the delight he experiences in viewing the represented scene by the delight he evokes n our oral actions of verbalising that representation.

29
Q

the ______ movements both in the scene and in Auden’s verbal representations are brought to an abrupt top by the sturdy sequence of stressed ST’s in then imperative to ‘stand stable here’

A

restless

30
Q

‘ST’s’

A

recurr in many English words that denote a sudden cessation of movement

31
Q

‘the swaying sound of the sea’

A

the sibilance of the enunciated s’ mimics the sussurus (murmur) of the sliding sea at the same time that the undulating rhythm of the spoken line most prominent in the tension and rebound of the middle y in the word ‘swaying’, mimics the undulation of the waves that produces these sounds.

32
Q

the poem replicates the sounds…

A

that the words signify

33
Q

what is sussurus?

A

the murmur of the sea; harmony

34
Q

Auden reminds us by oral _____ that at the seas edge they waves strike the shore making ‘slapping’ sounds: ‘pluck and knock’.

A

echoes

35
Q

he learns from Hopkins the trick of _____ a word in the middle and then rhyming the first half of a severed word with the end word of a nearby verse line (oppose the pluck / after the sucking surf’

A

breaking

36
Q

why does he break the word ‘suck/ing surf’

A

to emphasise a change of direction in the gesture of enunciating the speech sound from the from the front to the back of mouth in ‘suck’ then from the back to the front of the mouth to end far forward with the dental labial ‘F’. There reversal of motion in enunciating those sounds enacts the reversal in motion of the surf that the word signifies as the wavelets reach up on the shore, stop and then revert to the open sea.

37
Q

each of the three stanzas contains a remarkable variety of lines.

A

He uses the irregular pattern of the visual aspect to replicate the irregular visual pattern that is etched on the shore by the advancing and retreating waves.

38
Q

‘through the channels of ear may wander like a river the swaying sound of the sea’

A

Auden attributes to the consciousness of you, the perceiver, a spatial dimension into which the oscillating water sounds enter as though the sounds were themselves water that flows through your ear cannals (the channels of the ear) into your conscience mind.

39
Q

‘and the full view / indeed may enter and move in memory as now these clouds do, / that past the harbour mirror’

A

as the moving clouds are reflected in the water, so the full view - full because it includes both the water and the clouds that are reflected in the water is in its turn reflected in the perceivers consciousness where the clouds continue to move but now in the perceivers memory.

40
Q

the outer is fused with the inner so that the scene and the seer, the perceiver and the natural things perceived are assimilated into a single exuberant perceptible whole.

A

‘channels of the ear’ and ‘full view’

41
Q

‘and move in memory as now these clouds do’

A

five sequential stresses

42
Q

‘and all the summer through the water saunter’

A

he lengthens the concluding lines of the stanza from 3 feet to 5 feet: so that he can make the length and the metric pace of these enunciate lines accord with what they note; that is with a sustained unhurried space fo the moving clouds that are reflected in the water.

43
Q

‘harbour’ ‘mirror’ ‘summer’ ‘water’ ‘saunter’

A

contain a sequence of no less than five two syllable trochaic words, all of which rhyme but on the offbeat only

44
Q

linguistic analysis of the last lines

A

recurrent half rhymes denote ease due to the nasal continuum of m sounds in mirror and summer, then the movement to the contrasting plosive T in water, and to conclude with the combination of both nasal and plosive of the ‘N’ and ‘T’ in that perfectly apt word, the artfully delayed, indolent verb, ‘saunter’.

45
Q

Richard Johnson

A

‘the words interact “metrically” quite as the images they denote interact physically… As emphasised by repetitions and alliterations, and by the many internal rhymes and partial rhymes, the individual words become units that act upon one another much as the individual images in the poem interact…’

46
Q

F.R Leavis in 1936 review

A

Auden is ‘happily in love with expression’ and he ‘certainly has a gift for words; he delights in them and they come’