Suffering/Vulnerability/Loss Flashcards
Suffering in Visiting Hour Quotes
“The hospital smell combs my nostrils” - metaphor
“I will not feel, I will not/feel until/I have to” - repetition, line break
“A withered hand trembles on its stalk” - metaphor
“Into an arm wasted of colour a glass fang is fixed” -alliteration, metaphor, threatening
“And between her and me all distances shrinks until there is none left but the distance of pain neither she nor I can cross.” - imagery
“in the round waves of a swimming bell” -drowning in sorrow and pain
Suffering in Assisi
“like a half filled sack” - simile
“tiny twisted legs from which sawdust might run” - metaphor, irony
“Whose eyes wept puss”
“A ruined temple”
Vulnerability in Assisi
“whose lopsided mouth said Grazie in a voice as sweet as a child’s when she speaks to her mother or a bird’s when it spoke to St Francis”
Suffering in Memorial
“Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.” repetition, overpowering
“no lurking beautiful mountain” - taunting him
“How can my hand clasp another’s when between them is that thick death that intolerable distance?” - rhetorical question, no answer, can’t get through it
“Ever since she died she can’t stop dying.” - present tense, vivid
“She makes me her elegy” - he is a physical embodiment of death
Suffering in Sound of the Day
“When the door scrapped shut it was the end of all sounds there are” - hyperbole, word choice
“You left me” - positioning, poignant
“You feel a bangle of ice round your wrist before the whole hand goes numb.”
