Flashcards
Larkin and Duffy language features
Cards in this deck (50)
- 1‘…across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures…’Faith Healing
- 2‘…rabid storms of chording/By being distant overpower my mind’Broadcast
- 3‘…In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love.’Faith Healing
- 4"But wait, not do fast: Is there such a contrast? He was out for his own ends Not just pleasing his friends;"Self's the Man
- 5Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous cock and ballscoarse language - fits with coarse image
sensory language - makes image come vividly to life - 6"...there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."Whitsun Weddings
- 7The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding.Whitsun Weddings
- 8grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go,Whitsun Weddings
- 9"...an agreement That I was too selfish, withdrawn, And easily bored to love. Well, useful to get that learnt. "plain diction, unpoetic. Cynical narrator
- 10"Wrote over four hundred letters, Gave a ten-guinea ring I got back in the end,"plain diction, recounts facts, unemotional
- 11I try the door of where I used to live: Locked.One word sentence links to Duffy.
Past is closed can't go back in contrast to Duffy - 12"...see the ranged Joining and parting lines reflect a strong Unhindered moon. "Dockery and Son
- 13"Why did he think adding meant increase? To me it was dilution. "Dockery and Son
- 14Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.Dockery and Son
- 15"Time has transfigured them into Untruth..."An Arundel Tomb
- 16"To prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love."Hesitant language
- 17But if he stood and watched the frigid wind Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,Mr Bleaney
- 18Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a wordMCMXIV
- 19Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring, if you like. Lethal.Valentine
- 20…wished him dead. Prayed for it so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes, ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.Havisham
- 21…seeing childhood in the conkers through my tears. Bonkers. And me so butch in my boots down the macho bars...Cliche Kid
- 22But the word was out. Some would never fall in love had they not heard of love.Nostalgia
- 23The way the trees drew sly faces from light and shade, the wood let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck,Stafford Afternoons
- 24…children scattered and shrieked and time fell from the sky like a red ball.Stafford Afternoons
- 25…those who stayed put, fearful of a sweet pain in the heart; of how it hurt, in that heavier air, to hear the music of homeNostalgia
- 26They had an ache here, Doctor, they pined, wept, grown men.Nostalgia
- 27I let a horse in the noisy field sponge at my palm and invented, in colour, a vivid lie for us both.Stafford Afternoons
- 28It gets worse. Chalkdust. The old schoolroom empty. This kid is so unpopular even my imaginary friend left me for another child.Cliche Kid
- 29I need help, Doc, and bad; I can’t forget the rustle of my father’s ballgownCliche Kid
- 30Maestro. Monster. Mummy’s Boy. My Main Man.The Biographer
- 31I snivel home to my wife. Her poems and jam. Her forgiveness.The Biographer
- 32You] would barely have noticed me at all. Guilt and rage hardened me then, and later I felt your dislike chilling the airThe Biographer
- 33I lived in a kind of fizzing hope. Gargling with Vimto. The clever smell of my satchel.Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
- 34dominus domine dominum. Dave Dee Dozy … try me. Come on.Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
- 35my stale wife … My thick kids ..Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
- 36I want it back. The captain. The one with all the answers..Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
- 37I look so brainy you’d think I’d just had a bath. The blazer. The badge. The tie.Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
- 38The soundtrack then was a litany – candlewick bedspread three piece suite display cabinet –Litany
- 39stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles,Litany
- 40An embarrassing word, broken to bits, which tensed the air like an accident.Litany
- 41no one had cancer, or sex, or debts, and certainly not leukaemia which no one could spell.Litany
- 42…scare yourself within an inch of the heart at the prompt of a word. How old are you now? This is what happens –Beachcomber
- 43This is about something. Harder. The red spade scooping a hole in the sand.Beachcomber
- 44The house where you were one of the brides has cancer. It prefers to be left aloneNever Go Back
- 45You talk for hours in agreed motifs, anecdotes shuffled and dealt from a well-thumbed pack, snapshots.Never Go Back
- 46Never return to the space where you left time pining till it died.Never Go Back
- 47The driver looks like death. The places you knew have changed their names by neon, cheap tricks in a theme-park with no nameNever Go Back
- 48in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows the right walk home could bring.glamorous images and language, fizzy has sense of life bubbling up, bursting with excitement
- 49my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics, and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square till I see you, clear as scent,Uses synesthesia - perhaps because smell is strongest sense; links to ghost - is this real?
red shoes evokes Dorothy and Wizard of Oz.
Relics - religious lexis (used in other poems) to suggest a kind of secular faith (c.f. Prayer) - 50hat glamorous love lasts where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.Before You Were Mine