Toads Flashcards
1
Q
CONTEXT
A
- Poet Laureate
- Librarian in Hull for 30 years
- Movement : “Honest, unsentimental and routed in everyday experience”
2
Q
STRUCTURE
A
- Repeated Quatrains : emphasises restriction and mundanity of work
- Half-rhyme scheme : reflects half of speaker doesn’t want to work versus half of him knows he has to
3
Q
“Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?”
A
- Rhetorical question : reflects the claustrophobic nature of the toad
- Connotations of heaviness and burdensome
- Sense of permanence - wont leave
4
Q
“Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off?”
A
- Rhetorical Question : emphasises uncertainty and desperation to get rid off toad
- Imagery of violence : burdening nature of the toad
5
Q
“Six days of the week it soils”
A
- Sibilance : prolonging of the sentence emphasises the mundane and monotonous nature of the work
- Claustrophobic
6
Q
“Just for paying a few bills!”
A
- Imperative : diminishes work, futile nature
- Forced to work to exist
7
Q
“Lecturers, lispers, losers, loblolly-men, louts”
A
- Asyndetic listing + alliteration : emphasises the undisputed intelligence of the speaker who has the potential to go far but rejects the potential
- Archaic words emphasises his “wits”
8
Q
“Lots of folk live up lanes with fires in a bucket, Eat windfalls and tinned sardines”
A
- Listing : homelessness and harsh reality
- War-like imagery
9
Q
“ - They seem to like it”
A
- Enjambment and Endstop emphasises the condescension and dismissive nature of the speaker
- Tone : mocking
- Sense of jealousy that they don’t have to work
- “seem” : judgemental
- “they” : emphasises separation between speaker and homeless
10
Q
“Their nippers have got bare feet,
A
