Memorial Flashcards
Everywhere she dies
Metaphor: people can’t literally die everywhere
Present tense - he’s not moved on, it keeps happening for him
Death changes everything, no escape
His life is affected in Everest and her death impacts a lot of people
Everywhere I go she dies
Repetition to emphasise the fact that it keeps happening, grief is always there
No sunrise
Nothing beautiful
No city square
Nothing lively or busy
No lurking beautiful mountain
No is repeated to emphasise the fact that there is no place he doesn’t think about her
He is always thinking about her
But has her death in it
He can’t do anything without thinking about her and feeling the pain again
The silence of her dying sounds through
He will never hear her voice again
Shows the emptiness of his life
Paradox
All he can hear is the silence in his life where she would have talked
The carousel of language
Metaphor for people talking and their conversations going round and round like the fairground ride
It’s a web
Sticky
Intricate
Detailed
Complex
On which laughter stitches itself
Laughter is trapped in the web that is death so it is no longer in his life
How can my hand clasp another’s
Not moving on
Death has frozen life
Seems impossible to relate to others
Thick death
Word choice
Huge and smothering
Intolerable distance
Gap between light and death
Can’t bridge gap
She grieves for my grief
She is selfless, she’s not scared of dying she just doesn’t want him to be sad
Grief
Processing feelings of sadness when someone dies
That bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it
Painkillers are making her say buzzard things
She’s remembering seeing that
She can see it from her window
Crocus
Purple flower that is yellow in the middle
Her dying shapes my mind
Gradually her death changes the way he sees things
Other words
Change of tone, trying to look at it differently
Consoling words from his friends and family
Black words
Words of illness and death
Funeral colour
Mourning and grieving
She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me That bird dives from the sun, that fish Leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently Than the way her dying Shapes my mind - but I hear, too, The other words, Black words that make the sound Of soundlessness, that name the nowhere She is continuously going into
This stanza contrasts beautiful life - bird, sun, crocus -
and the darkness of death - black words, nowhere, soundlessness
Soundlessness
Echoes silence from earlier
Nowhere
Hell, heaven, afterlife
Continuously
Links to everywhere
Ever since she died
Past tense
She can’t stop dying
Hasn’t let her go yet
Elegy
Family member speaking at a funeral
Speech used to remember someone
I am a walking masterpiece
Masterpieces are created to convey messages of meaning
Metaphor to compare himself to a work of art created in remembrance to her
Ugliness
His pain and suffering
I am her sad music
The person left behind becomes the memorial
His feelings and memories are a memorial to her
