Point 1 Flashcards
P1
Both passages describe the journey from innocence to experience and from simplicity to complexity. Each effectively uses metaphor, imagery and specific language, including child-like descriptions, to depict the narrators’ beliefs and views prior to a life-changing experience.
P2
Szymborska’s poem can be interpreted as an intimate story of a child moving from youth into adulthood, or as the symbolic evolution of the world during the war through which the poet lived. The happiness of ignorance is also nostalgically contrasted with the pain of understanding that accompanies hard-won knowledge.
P3
The early views of the narrator, described in the past tense, are that the world is small and easily understood; a place where knowledge is common and life is simple. The phrase “Once we had the world backwards and forwards” may allude to memorization without true understanding as a small child would learn in school.
P4
The narrator’s world was “so small it fit in two clasped hands, / so simple that a smile did to describe it, / so common”, reinforcing the small scale of a child’s known world, suggesting it is closed off from the larger world.
P5
The phrase “a smile did to describe it” portrays her world as happy, if small, and that the narrator has not yet learned the hard truths of life. This period of certainty and innocence is later disrupted by the passage of history, in the narrator’s case, a war, either literal or intellectual.
P6
“Total Eclipse”, the story of an outing to view a solar eclipse, also employs child-like descriptions to convey the narrator’s experience of what she has seen. The extract begins with the words “early in the morning”, which seems to reference a beginning, specifically an early stage in life, such as childhood, representing innocence and the beginning of the path to knowledge and understanding. This is quickly juxtaposed with the blanketing darkness created by the eclipse blocking out the morning sun.
P7
This perspective is then reinforced by simple metaphors explaining the phenomenon that would be familiar to a child, such as “a lens cover or the lid of a pot” and the narrator’s protest that “It did not look like the moon. It was enormous and black”.
P8
The narrator rejects the scientific explanation for the mechanics of the eclipse as not being consistent with what she saw, insisting that she only knew what the eclipse was because she had read about it. “If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the sight a hundred times and never once thought of the moon”. This evokes how children struggle to understand concepts and believe explanations that do not relate to their own experiences.
