11697580
Description
Flashcards by Leo Bideleux, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Leo Bideleux
over 6 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| About the poet | Beatrice Garland was born in 1938 in Oxford. After completing her degree in English literature she worked in the NHS. In 2001 she won the national poetry prize. Beatrice Garland had a certain interest in why people gave up their lives for a certain cause. Beatrice Garland wrote the poem with the conflict being personal and national. Cultural expectations and inner conscience. This is the conflict in the poem. |
| Poems to compare it to. | Tissue - Fundamentalism and terrorism Exposure - Talks about the power of nature. |
| 1st stanza overview | The girls father left at sunrise with a flask of water and a samurai sword in the cockpit. He also had a shaven head full of ideas and only enough fuel for a one way journey. |
| 2nd Stanza overwiew | Half way on the journey to the end of their life. Whilst recounting the story to her children she imagines that he must have looked down at the sea and saw the fishing boats |
| 3rd Stanza overview | Beneath the fishing boats you could see the fishes moving in different patterns. |
| 4th stanza overview | It reminded him of his (pilot) own childhood when he was with his brothers and his father. |
| 5th stanza overview | The grandfathers boat could be seen by the girl telling the story imaginarily. Filled with all kinds of different fishes and things |
| 6th stanza overview | Even though the father came back the mother ignored him and pretended like he wasn't there. Only the children still spoke with him. |
| 7th stanza overview | Even the children learned to ignore him. The mother wondered which way was better to die. Kamikaze or ignored by the family. |
| Context | WW2 - Kamikaze was a way to describer Japanese fighter pilots who were sent on suicide missions to fly into enemy boats. |
| Structure | 6 lines per stanza which is a tight structure. This reflects the tight order of the military and the cultural expectations. However the poem is written in free verse (no rhyming and an irregular rhythm) and also there are examples of enjambment "till gradually we too learned" The irregular use of punctuation at the end of a line symbolises how it is not very strict and doesn't follow the rules. A lot like his inner conscience. |
| Language | "Green-blue translucent sea" - Natural imagery. "The dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun" - Sibilance. The repetition of the 's' sound shows how nature creates energy and a smooth movement. The beauty of nature symbolises how the man shouldn't want to die. Looking at the nature made him change his mind. This means that nature was powerful enough to change his mind about committing suicide. |
| Language 2 | The use of "a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous." represents the power of nature which can be seen in the other poems like 'Ozymandias' and 'Exposure'. The use of listing here shows how Garland wants the audience think that the most powerful thing in the poem is the tuna. This would prove that Garland also believes that nature is more powerful than mankind. The metaphor "the dark prince" and the adjective "muscular" creates a threatening and powerful image. The poems first full stop appears after this line which also reinforces the importance of the tuna fish. When the kamikaze pilot is contrasted with the tuna fish. You could say that human life is very small when compared to nature. |
| Language 3 | "Her father embarked at sunrise" - Natural imagery. The sunrise could show the birth of a new day but this is contrasted with the fact that the pilot is going to die. Also Japan is known as the land of the rising sun. The verb "embarked" could symbolise how the pilot is going on an important journey. This could be talking about the kamikaze journey or the journey home that will change his families life. |
| Language 4 | "Built cairns of pearl grey pebbles" Cairns are usually built when there is a grave or a death. This is reinforced by the colour imagery of "grey" which can be associated with negative images. It can also be related to the death that will happen for the soldier. |
| Language 5 | "Powerful incantations" - Adjective. The pilot has been put under a spell and is made to go a die for his country. Furthermore the use of the noun "bunting" suggests that the family will be celebrating the kamikaze pilot because it is a very high honour being chosen. Moreover "arcing in swathes like a huge flag" has connotations of patriotism and wanting to do something for your country. |
| Type of narration | At the beginning it says "her father" and in the second stanza it says "she thought" This is in the third person showing the distance between her and her father. Showing the shame. Nearer the end it says "my mother". The first person shows how the mother is the pilots daughter. |
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