Paula Meehan (Poetry) Flashcards
The Exact Moment I Became a Poet
“Attend to your books, girls, or mark my words, you’ll end up in the sewing factory” - flippant consent by school teacher, introduces prejudice
Work was “robbed … of its dignity”
“Trussed like chickens on a conveyor belt” - industrial simile
“Words could pluck you, leave you naked, your lovely shiny feathers all gone” - metaphor, bleak imagery
→ irony that Meehan chose a literary career to escape the downgraded world of factories
Buying Winkles
” Dash from the ghosts on the stairs where the bulb had blown out into Gardiner street, all relief” - detailed description creates vivid images
“So. Stick it in till you feel a grip, then slither him out. Gently, mind” - colloquial language evokes the atmosphere of inner city Dublin
“The newspaper twists bulging fat with winkles” are carried “proudly home, like torches “- simile represents childs innocence
Prayer for the Children of Longing
“Grant us the clarity of ice … Grant us the forest’s silence” - reverential tone
“The scream, the siren, the knock on the door / the needle in its track / the knife in the back” - short, staccato rhythm gruesome images of suffering
“The streets that defeated them … that promised them everything / that delivered nothing “ - personified streets become a metaphor for society at the time
The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks
“Its seeds of ice would cut you to the quick “ - pathetic fallacy, cold atmosphere
“Stony robes” , “my being cries out to be incarnate, incarnate, maculae and tousled in a honeyed bed” - shocking sexual imagery
“I did not move / I didn’t lift a finger to help her / I didn’t intercede with heaven” - anaphora combined with short lines
“Town rocked up in little scandals”
Them Ducks Died for Ireland
Time is personified, it “slides slowly down the sash window / puddling in light on oaken boards” - sibilance, image of time passing
“When we’ve licked the wounds of history, wounds of war” - alliteration & repetition foregrounds losses suffered during conflict
“We’ll salute the strecher bearer, the nurse in white”
Heroes are commemorated “in bronze and stone” yet their memory is as “fragile as a breathmark on the windowpane” - simile - depicts memory asa fallible thing
