Poetry Flashcards
Giuseppe form and structure
“Giuseppe” is written in 29 lines of free verse divided into six irregular stanzas. In this form, the speaker recounts their Uncle Giuseppe’s story of murdering a mermaid in Italy during World War II.
The first five stanzas tell Giuseppe’s tale, episode by awful episode. The first stanza introduces a nightmarish scene: the world’s “only captive mermaid” laid out for butchery behind a Sicilian aquarium. Each new stanza thereafter captures a stage in that murder:
The final stanza switches its lens. Emerging from Giuseppe’s story, the reader now watches as Giuseppe finishes telling his tale to the speaker, unable to look them in the eye
Giuseppe language
Violence by men: the main theme around this poem is masculinity vs femininity. These men are in a war and are war creates monsters hence they go out and kill this ‘mermaid’ to cure their ‘starvation’.
Giuseppe imagery and tone
“Giuseppe” draws on the grim history of World War II. Set in the fascist dictator Mussolini’s Italy, the poem uses dreamlike imagery to explore what happens when people manage to persuade themselves that other people aren’t human.
Giuseppe rhyme, rheotoric, metre
“Giuseppe” is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Instead, Ford uses methodical line breaks and enjambments to create a steady, sinister pace. The poem’s speaker seems to be recounting his uncle Giuseppe’s story with creeping horror.
Consider the way the first stanza (“My Uncle Giuseppe told me […] and certain others.”) builds. The pace of these lines (all about the same length) is as methodical as the scene of butchery to come. At first, it seems as if Uncle Giuseppe might be about to recount a relatively pleasant memory Then, unexpectedly, the “only captive mermaid in the world” puts in an appearance—hangs there for one tantalizing moment—and is murdered in the very next line. Each unrushed line carries readers closer to a nightmare vision in horribly slow, inexorable steps
Eat me form and structure
“Eat Me” is built from ten brief tercets (three-line stanzas). This tight form gives the poem a tense and restrictive atmosphere—as though the poem, like the speaker, is being controlled.
The poem is a dramatic monologue, a kind of poem in which the poet behaves like an actor, taking on the first-person voice of a vivid character. Like a lot of dramatic monologues, this one tells a startling story, moving from the speaker’s constrained, static life with her abusive partner to the climactic breaking point when she finally fights back.
Eat me language
The alliteration in “Eat Me” helps to evoke the speaker’s appearance, her partner’s obsession with her weight, and the difference between their two experiences of this abusive relationship.
The round /b/ sounds here evoke the speaker’s own roundness (and chime with the /b/ in “wobble”); the letter even looks like a belly. “Judder” and “juggernaut”—which are also assonant—conjure a picture of a jelly-like wobbling, which is exactly what the speaker’s partner wants to see.
Soon after this stanza, the partner talks about his desire for fat women. “The bigger the better,” he says in line 10, the alliteration making it seem like a pithy saying that he uses all the time
Alliteration also draws attention to some meaningful comparisons between the speaker’s and her partner’s different experiences. For instance, the speaker’s “only pleasure,” for many years, is “fast food,” while her partner likes to see her “swell like forbidden fruit.” These two moments of /f/ alliteration invite the reader to notice that, while the speaker can only take pleasure in cheap “fast food,” her partner relishes the “forbidden fruit” of her body as if he were in Eden itself. Her life thus feels sad and limited compared to his fantasy-world.
Eat me imagery and tone
This poem is a dramatic monologue. Though the speaker uses the first-person pronoun throughout, she isn’t the poet herself. Instead, the speaker is a voice for the many women who get trapped in abusive relationships.
The speaker’s matter-of-fact voice makes it feel as if she’s gotten numb to her partner’s cruelty. For instance, when she eats the cake he brings her to celebrate, not her thirtieth birthday, but her weight gain, she eats it without even tasting it, and describes this awful moment in short, straightforward lines.
Later in the poem, she defines herself by her partner’s standards, using a series of strange metaphors in which she seems to understand herself only as a huge body (e.g. “His desert island after shipwreck” in line 16). Long years of abuse have clearly eaten away at her sense of self.
But the speaker also reveals flashes of dark humor—especially at the end of the poem, when she ironically triumphs over her abuser. While she certainly doesn’t get an uncomplicated happy ending, she does manage, at last, to fight back.
Eat me rhyme, rheotoric, metre
“Eat Me” doesn’t have a strict meter, an effect that makes the poem feel deceptively calm. Because the poem’s rhythms feel natural and conversational rather than formal and poetic, the speaker sounds matter-of-fact as she describes the horrors of her abusive relationship. It’s as if years of suffering have numbed her. This unassuming tone makes the poem’s darkly ironic ending feel all the more striking.
While the poem doesn’t have a regular meter, it does use rhythm and sound to make meaning. For instance, the lines get steadily, subtly longer as the poem goes on: the poem slowly swells, just as the speaker does under her partner’s abusive diet regime.
There is a regular—but very subtle—rhyme scheme at work throughout the poem. It runs like this:
AAABBBCCC
This subtle, disguised rhyme scheme mirrors how the speaker’s partner keeps an underhanded hold on her, disguising his manipulative feeding as love.
Material form and structure
“Material” is made up of 72 lines divided into nine stanzas. The majority of these stanzas are octaves, meaning they have eight lines each. Stanzas 6 and 7 are irregular, having nine and seven lines respectively, but overall stanza lengths feel pretty consistent. For the most part, stanzas are self-contained, with the exception of stanzas 5 and 6, which are connected by enjambment
Material language
In lines 13-16, the speaker uses a simile to joke that her mother carried around so many handkerchiefs it was like she was breeding them. She also personifies her mother’s hankies within this simile
The enjambment here mimics what the poem describes: the description of the fishmonger’s shop is located just above—”opposite”—that of the dancing school.
The poem also features plenty of colloquial language (including quite a bit of slang). This makes the poem sound modern and conversational, but there’s also some tension between the poem’s casual language and its fixed stanza length, bouncy meter, and steady rhyme scheme—all of which are features more common in older poetry. The push and pull between more formal and looser verse might subtly reflect the speaker’s nostalgia for her mother’s era: a time when hankies were made of cloth and the world, in hindsight, felt more familiar and predictable.
Material rhyme scheme
Material” follows an ABCBDEFE rhyme scheme throughout. Each stanza can essentially be broken into two quatrains in which the second and fourth lines rhyme with each other while the first and third lines do not.
This is a very common rhyme scheme in poetry, often seen in hymns and nursery rhymes. It adds sweet, lighthearted music to the poem, which fits right in with the speaker’s nostalgia for a simpler past. Many of the poem’s rhymes are slant: “cloth”/”shops,” “aunts”/”ponce,” etc. These imperfect rhymes keep the poem feeling a little more down-to-earth than clear, perfect rhymes all the way through otherwise might.
To My Nine Year Old Self form and structure
“To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is made up of six stanzas of varying lengths. is not written using any particular meter, rhyme scheme, or traditional form, however. Rather, the poem is structured as a dramatic monologue composed in free verse. The general lack of structure resonates with the free-spirited nature of the speaker’s nine-year-old self.
That said, there is an unusual pattern occurring when it comes to the poem’s stanza lengths. Stanza 1 is a quintet, or five-line stanza. Stanza 2 is a sestet, or six-line stanza. Stanza 3 is a septet, or seven-line stanza. Stanza 4 is a sestet. Stanza 5 is a quintet. Finally, stanza 6 is a tercet, or three-line stanza. Therefore, the stanza lengths increase successively from the first to third stanza before decreasing successively until the end of the poem.
the speaker attempts to connect with her younger self and reminisces about their shared past. The increasing stanza lengths reflect the adult speaker trying to journey deeper into her childhood world.
However, in the fourth stanza—the point at which the stanza lengths begin to decrease—the speaker admits they have “nothing in common / beyond a few shared years” and could not even be friends. This is the point in the poem at which the speaker acknowledges and accepts the differences between them, and that nothing she says or do can change the past. Consequently, the speaker delivers fewer and fewer lines each stanza until she decides to depart from the past entirely. The stanza lengths, therefore, enhance and emphasize the speaker’s emotional development over the course of the poem.
To My Nine Year Old Self imagery and tone
Imagery is abundant in “To My Nine-Year-Old Self.” Throughout the poem, Dunmore uses imagery to engage the reader, develop the character of both the speaker and her younger self, and establish symbolism.
Throughout the poem, the vivid imagery also highlights the dynamism of the speaker’s childhood world. At the end of stanza 4 and the beginning of stanza 5, the speaker leaves her younger self to her own devices
The act of “hid[ing]” in the streets from imagined kidnappers, while not an idyllic image, nevertheless vividly evokes the emotions and fears of children. Her younger self’s world is, therefore, extremely dynamic, containing within it a range of powerful emotions and beauty
To My Nine Year Old Self rhyme scheme
To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is written in free verse, therefore it is not composed in any particular meter or rhyme scheme. This lack of rigid rhyme scheme resonates with the free-spirited character of the speaker’s nine-year-old self. This younger self is, after all, the focus of the poem, and her childhood world is the world which the speaker now inhabits.
The poem does, however, contain a few instances of slant rhyme within various lines. Dunmore uses these moments to enhance the musicality of the language, draw attention to certain ideas and phrases, and play with the rhythm of the poem.
In the second stanza, for example, the speaker shows her younger self the ways in which her body has physically deteriorated. The speaker displays the “careful” way she moves due to a “bad back or a bruised foot.” The assonance of the long /a/ sound and consonance of the /b/ sound in “bad back” make this an arguable slant rhyme that focuses the readers’ attention on the speaker’s physical ailments. There is a great deal of such assonance and consonance throughout the poem, making it rich with sound despite the absence of a true rhyme scheme.
The Furthest Distances I’ve travelled form and structure
“The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled” is written in free verse, without a regular meter. However, it does use a roughly regular shape: its 32 lines are broken into eight quatrains (four-line stanzas). Though the consistent stanza length adds some structure and predictability to the poem, individual lines vary considerably. The shortest is only half a word long!
This variety, alongside lots of unexpected enjambments, mirrors the novelty and strangeness of the speaker’s travels, upon which the speaker saw everything from the busy streets of “Krakow / and Zagreb” to a remote “sherpa pass.” The surprises in the poem’s shape also evoke the surprises in the speaker’s life, up to and including the discovery that the “furthest distances” might be between one person and another, not between hemispheres.
The Furthest Distances I’ve travelled setting
The poem doesn’t say where that home is, exactly, but judging by the speaker’s vocabulary, readers can guess it’s probably somewhere in the UK or Ireland. Here, they spend their time doing “overdue laundry,” running errands, and tidying up their home, sorting through ephemera of past relationships—in short, living a fairly humdrum and ordinary life.
The poem also evokes the speaker’s more adventurous past. The poem’s larger point about place is that physical travel is only one way to cross great distances. Crossing the gap “between people” is its own kind of mighty journey.
The Furthest Distances I’ve travelled rhyme scheme
The poem uses a straightforward rhyme scheme of couplets, like this:
AABB
Notice, however, that many of the poem’s rhymes are slant, and often very faint: “spine” and “meridian” in the first stanza, for example, only share /n/ consonance, and “white” and “airports” in the second stanza share even more tenuous /t/ consonance. These less-than-perfect rhymes make the poem’s musicality more subtle, especially since many lines are enjambed, discouraging the reader from overemphasizing the last words of lines and giving the poem a relaxed, conversational tone.
The Furthest Distances I’ve travelled metre
The poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t have a regular meter. The lack of meter—along with the use of colloquial vocabulary like “pants” and “holidaying”—means the poem sounds as footloose as the speaker was in their younger days. It also makes the speaker’s voice feel casual and conversational, as if they were just telling an anecdote to a friend.
On Her Blindness form and structure
- Opens with statement about mother’s feelings, through her experiences, to her illness and finally death
- Written in regular length lines, in couplets, broken finally in the single final line: signifying her death
- Exaggerated enjambment between stanzas 12 and 13 in long//slow slide - foregrounding the prolongued descent into blindness, and this breaking of units of sense across the white space between stanzas has a disorientating effect on the reader, echoing the mother’s confusion
On Her Blindness language and syntax
-Title of poem - adaption of a famous sonnet by John Milton ‘On his Blindness’ written in 1655 after his loss became complete - Milton declares a need to bear loss bravely
- Lexical clusters of blindness ‘blind’, ‘couldn’t see’, ‘blank as a stone’ in a poem about concealing the truth, and about pretence - irony is real
‘One shouldn’t say it’ - central to the idea about what can and cant be said, which runs through the whole poem. Even when close to death she maintains the fiction of being able to see - ‘its lovely out there’ - the last line suggests even after death, she is still subject to the comforting fiction which likes to imagine the dead watching over us. Part of the poem’s power lies in both the narrator’s acknowledgement of the lies we tell ourselves in the face of frality and ageing, and his regret at ‘looking at the wrong way’.
- Lexis of negatives and resolutions (‘finished’, ‘blank’, ‘wrong’) reversed in death as her sight is percieved to be reversed (she watching)
On Her Blindness imagery
- Metaphor of hell is repeated twice - mother is trapped in hell, unable to escape, while the son is trapped (locked in) in inadequate language
- Similie of Roman, connoting stoicism and bravery, and a suffering that is common to mankind through history
- Autumn foreshadows her death, and the colour ‘golden’, ‘ablaze’, ‘royal’ are all reminders of the riches the mother has lost
On Her Blindness rhyme, metre, rhetoric
- Phonological echoes throughout the ‘end’, ‘pretend’ x2 (tend, end) the death and the pretense are central to the poem
- Contrast of the sibilance of the ‘slow side’, slowing the pace - contrasting to the hard sounds of glottals of ‘blank as stone’ and the following stanzas (‘Berkshire’, ‘exhibitions’, ‘sink’, ‘weak’) foreshadowing the threat of death
The Gun form and structure
“The Gun” is a 30-line poem broken up into six stanzas of different lengths. Written in free verse, it has a loose, unstructured feel, and its shape evolves along with the speaker’s thoughts.
For instance, the two-line first stanza makes a bold opening statement: “Bringing a gun into a house / changes it.” Right away, it’s clear that the rest of the poem will illustrate how, exactly, a gun changes a house.
And this is exactly what happens. Each of the following stanzas illustrates a different way that the gun alters the speaker’s house and, eventually, her life. Because the speaker isn’t tied to a rigid poetic form, these stanzas can change shape to fit the shape of her thoughts, ranging from seven-line stanzas of vivid description to a one-line stanza that makes a bold, punchy statement: “A gun brings a house alive.”
This poem’s fresh, engaging, free-flowing form thus evokes the speaker’s mood as she begins to enjoy the gun’s power, letting her fit her language to her thoughts and feelings.
