Dart Quotes Flashcards
The voice of the river itself?
‘whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx / who’s in my privacy’ - beginning of new stanza + enjambment
The who question comes back and the end of the poem?
‘who’s this moving in the dark? Me. / This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy’
Opens the final tercet of the poem?
‘all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus’
Classical allusion - Proteus was the god whom Menelaus had to capture in order to allow the sea-voyage back from Troy. Seizing him while he lay asleep, Menelaus had to hold on to him for dear life as the god continually changed shape in his grasp
Quotes of Theodore Schwenk?
‘rhythmical and spiralling movements’
‘spiralling surfaces which glide past one another’
Imagery of a drowning man?
‘rolling me round, like a container / upturned and sounded through’
The poem has sensitivity to the jostling of lives and livelihoods?
‘scrambled and screw-like currents’
The river picks up memories?
One anonymous voice notices that, at times, there is ‘this pause superimposed on water’
The title of the poem?
Dart, a marginal note tells us, ‘is Old Devonian for ‘oak’’, and connects the river to the trees that grow alongside it
The progress of the river?
We track the river through a Dartmoor hotel, then to ‘like some / horrible revolving cylinder’ of river in spate which almost drowns a canoeist. We arrive at a bottle spinning in Unigate milk plant
The voice of the ferryman?
He works the car ferry ‘backwards and forwards for twenty-three years.’
‘always on the way over -to or fro -‘ caesura emphasises monotony
Classical allusion to Charon, the ferryman of the dead responsible for transporting souls across the River Styx
The passage about oysters?
Puts the ‘three men on an oystering expedition’ and the ‘oyster-gatherers’ (a type of bird)
‘Who lives here? / Who dies here? / Only oysters’
Seems to gloss over death
Opening lines?
‘Who’s this moving alive over the moor? / An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.’
