Boland images and language Flashcards
(6 cards)
The war Horse Imagery
Political poem.
Boland moved into newly built house in Dundrum. She talks about he Violence from the Troubles she saw by “a small television chanting deaths and statistics at teatime”.
Main image = horse .
Represents the unpredictable violence up north.
The beginning of the poem describes the incongruous (out of place) appearance of a horse on a suburban street.
First recognised by the “clip, clop” of his hooves.
At first he is calm, no suspicious as his breath is “hissing” and his “snuffling head” is in the grass.
He then shows his unpredictable nature. He “stomps death” into the “innocent coinage of the earth”
Images are violent and militant. The torn head he is compared to a maimed limb, the crosscut blown alar as if by a bomb.
The “unformed fear” of the horses presence could be about about the force commitment of the paramilitary groups appearing in that conflict.
War horse language
The rhymed couplets create a strong sense of control and order, like the suburban gardens that the poem is set in.
As the horse disrupts the calmness, the poems phrasing and line breaks often work against the neatness of the rhymes.
There is enjembment, not just between the lines, but stanzas:
“His snuffling head// down”, “A volunteer// you might say”
At the end, a sense of clarity emerges, when the horse leaves, the assonance of long vowels slow the pace .
The accumulation of image and symbols the poem uses and relies on for effect can be seen as a manifestation of this tentative voice, searching for the right words to use.
Child of our time images
Political poem, written in response to bombings that killed 34 people including children in Dublin and Monaghan.
The imagery and symbols are childhood things, teaching and learning, and music
Childhood: things we can all relate to, nursery rhymes, cuddly toys, evoke innocence of childhood.
Teaching and learning: symbolises how the adult world failed the children by not being able to “instruct” them. Instead we must “learn from you” to make the world better.
Language in child of our time
3 stanzas that are sestets.
Every line rhymes, although there is no rhyming scheme. The tight form is matched by a lightly formed syntax that uses parallel phrases and antithesis.
Parallel phrases: reinforces the contrast of life and death. Peaceful images of childhood are reinforced by the lulling movement of matching pairs of phrases.
“Rhyme for your waking, rhythm for your sleep”, and “tales to distract, legends to protect”
Antitheses:In the first stanza, “reason” is set against the child’s unreasonable end, in the placement of living and the dead.
It’s also central to stanza 3 where “our broken images” contrast with “your broken image”
Boland gives the poem a clear form and string structure to set against the overwhelming grief that is being expressed. It is also part of the poets desire to salvage something poetic from the terrible event to “rebuild” the nations “broken images”.
This moment imagery
Set in suburban neighbourhood
The main symbol/ image is Boland and her life as a mother in a suburban neighbourhood. This is centre to the poem.
This poem and image achieves one of her goals to turn the ordinary life she had as a subject for her poetry.
“ bless the ordinary, sanction the common” as she wrote.
She write about the preciousness of each moment, even in an ordinary domestic setting.
The poem implies that the workings of the natural world - stars, maths, fruits - depend on such moments, and the simple, vivid images of the poem make that moment luminous.
