Mental Cases Flashcards
Structure:
Narrative verse
Alternating use of Iambic pentameter in the lines.
What was it originally going to be called?
The Deranged.
Lit crit:
New focus on Freudian psychoanalysis.
The Daily News, 1922:
‘We are all psycho-analysts now’.
‘Who are these?’
Acute reference to the ‘Book of Revelations’, where blood has cleansed people, but in Mental Cases, the soldiers are corrupted by blood.
‘Subversion of the Biblical message’.
‘Purgatorial shadows’.
Stuck in between a state of life and death.
‘Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish’.
Zoomorphic.
Reduced to a dog.
‘Baring teeth’ ‘Stroke on stroke of pain’.
Underlying imagery. Figuratively reducing them to a pet.
‘Slow panic’
Paradoxical phrase, removal from status quo.
‘Leer like skulls’.
Lateral alliteration, very uncomfortable sound created.
‘Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets’.
Eye imagery.
Epinome on sight is him constructively telling the arm-chair patriots to see more clearly.
‘Misery swelters’.
These mental cases have become the personification of misery.
‘Sleeping and walk hell’.
A reference to Dante’s Inferno from the ‘Divine Comedy’, which encompasses Dante’s journey to Hell.
Hell= the hospital.
Capitalisation of ‘Dead’.
Almost personifying death.
‘Lungs that had loved laughter’.
Extreme pathos evoked.
‘Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles’.
Internal rhyme, once again dehumanised.
Simply body parts.
