Poetry Flashcards
‘There once was a country’
Temporal deixis: childlike tone, fantastical
Memory, not realistic, romanticised but the idealism of youth
‘…’elipses
Unreliability of author
Pause to gather thoughts
‘It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants’
Anaphoric
Subjunctive case: flaws seem hypothetical, doesn’t change perspective
‘Branded by an impression of sunlight’
Juxtaposition of positive and negative aspects
Love and patriotism for country will always overrule Amy feelings of pain caused by it
Epistrophe of sunlight (‘it taste of sunlight’)
Gustatory imagery, delight in memory
Love overrules any pain or negativity against her country
‘I comb its hair and love its shining eyes’
Maternal metaphor
Unconditional love and protective tendencies
‘They accuse me’
Emphatic repetition shows the persecution endured in the new home (violent tone)
‘They’ aggressive and accusatory tone make the city seem threatening and hostile, feelings of segregation
Racism: new threat, not physical conflict but social rejection, doesn’t belong doesn’t share culture or identity
Negative traits of new city are stated definitively,certainty of flaws, no longer the naivety of childhood altering her perspective
Significance of last stanza
Caesura and end-stopped line
Entrapped, inescapable, unwelcome and separated
Free verse
Sense of chaos, conversely interpreted as indicative of freedom
What type of poem is it? What is the significance?
Universal poem, imma,ed, for all emigrants
Relation and can be identified with others in the same situation
What is the form and structure?
Free verse
Chaotic and discordance, chaos in her home country, chaos in her own mind (internal conflict)
Inability to control the things around her, struggle in a new country
Stanza lengths
8 8 9
Attempt to take control at the end
Still able to end on sunlight
