Summaries and Key points Flashcards
Sonnet 43
Petrarchan sonnet
- octet - compares love to political/religious ideas
- sestet - compares feelings to past experience by alliteration and repetition
Themes: love, mortality
- anaphora ‘I love thee’ builds rhythm and display intensity as it’s barely controlled
- 2nd line assonance mimics breathless - highlights metaphor which measures her feelings
- final line is simple and contrasts poem showing death cannot break love
To His Coy Mistress
First person dramatic monologue
- first stanza = flattery
- second stanza = pressure/threat
- third stanza = preferred outcome
Themes: desire, carpe diem, mortality
- repetition of ‘now’ shows desire
- metaphors link sex to death = a threat
- first person plural pronoun in final stanza shows unity
- time references (long) in first stanza contrast urgency in final stanza
- imagery/similes flatter her but also subtly instruct her with what he wants
The Farmer’s Bride
First person monologue
Themes: desire, marriage, nature
- rhetorical questions show his confusion
- similes to nature imagery distance the wife from human world
- she’s hunted like prey showing his dominance
- the relationship is an extended metaphor for the inferiority of women at the time
- internal rhyme and repetition in final stanza show he is tormented by desire
- changing seasons and nature references suggests he knows nature better than his bride
Hour
Sonnet
Themes: love, time, desire
- two lovers and the brief time they have together - extended metaphor for life
- semantic field of wealth
- 2 myths = Midas and Rumpelstiltskin - suggests fantasises of love
- hyperbolic language/metaphors suggests power of love
- variation of sonnet form shows imperfect relationship and underlying tension
Quickdraw
Free verse with enjambement and caesura.
Themes: desire, pain
- Western imagery contrast modern imagery - metaphor for their feelings
- extended metaphor of gunfight shows lovers fight with voices as weapons
- structure highlights important phrases e.g. you’ve wounded me
- metaphorical terms
- initial and terminal caesura
- strong sense of ambiguity - pain or lust?
Praise Song For My Mother
Praise song - eulogy of someone’s life, traditional African form
- Explores what her mum means to her and directly addresses her at the end
Themes: love, motherhood
- no punctuation and repeated final line shows limitless love
- repetition of structure shows constancy of love
- nature imagery to show the pure love
- “you said” direct to mother
- objects are all life necessities shows importance of mother
- lyrical tone suggests gentle and caring feelings
The Manhunt
- injured soldier described by wife
- rhyming couplets each show an aspect of the body and hence an aspect of the relationship
- phrases show the effects on their relationship by metaphors
- military imagery suggests formal, disjointed relationship
- journey to the source shows the discovery of their relationship
Ghazal
Ghazal
Themes: passion, love, desire
- full rhyme, each couplet suggests an aspect of love e.g. mystical
- couplets all end in ‘me’ showing the effect of love on the speaker
- each couplet is called a sher
- conditional ‘if’ shows uncertainty of relationship or the endless possibilities of love
- varying imagery: poetic, nature, mystery shows the wide range of feelings that love relates to, its ever consuming
Sister Maude
Traditional ballad
Themes: jealousy, sin, siblings
- sibling shows anger towards Sister Maude who supposedly caused the death of sibling’s lover
- repetition emphasises torment and exasperation in the first stanza
- sibilance in 3rd stanza shows her anger as ‘s’ sounds like a spitting tone
- final lines act as a volta - direct to Maude, the metre emphasises “you…death…sin” to show her fate
- reference in second and third person shows distance and indecisiveness about her feeling’s; sadness, anger
Born Yesterday
Free verse
- his wish for her happiness despite life maybe being dull/ordinary
Themes: wishes, happiness
- negative words to show the disappointment of life and build tension
- reference to others distances himself proving his intimacy to the baby
- structure, long sentences over short lines steadies the reading, creates bathos and suspense
- listing of adjectives makes his wishes clear
- opening metaphor is gentle
Sonnet 116
Sonnet - 4,4,2
- first 2 quatrains - unchanging nature of love
- third quatrain - lasting nature of love
- this change is the volta
- talks about what love is not with negative words
- paired words show the unity of love
- constant rhythm and rhyme, and North star reference show the constancy and trusting nature of love
- nautical metaphor towards love represents the voyage of discovery
Brothers
- describes incident between brothers
Themes: childhood, regret - internal rhyme sounds childish tone
- energetic verbs contrasts lethargic verbs showing mixed feelings between siblings
- lack of imagery, grammatically incorrect and proper nouns creates a conversational tone
- older brother burdened by younger brother
- ambiguous past tense - “looking back” from adulthood or in the situation
In Paris With You
- man broken up and with new lover in Paris
Themes: sex, self-discovery - Paris = romantic city, ironic that first line reads “don’t talk to me of love”
- colloquialism - informal, intimate mood
- metonymy - in Paris = in love
- unusual syntax and comic tone contrasts idea of love and suggests uncertainty about the relationship/situation - perhaps regret about this trip to Paris
Nettles
- regular ABAB rhyme scheme
Themes: parenting, war, violence - military imagery personifies the nettles as soldiers
- nettles growing back is a metaphor for the constant struggles of life
- emotive language and sensory imagery show the father’s compassion and sympathy
- contrasted by his violent attack
- whole poem demonstrates the futility of parental protection
Harmonium
- Explores father and son relationship using the harmonium as a symbol
Themes: mortality, regret, parenthood - personification of dead body
- present tense contrasts past ideas suggesting their relationship strong
- colloquial language shows informal tone, reflecting reluctance to address death
- strong death/funeral imagery
- nature imagery when reminiscing
