death and mortality P&H

Question 1

medallion - start quotes

Answer 1

Title
- creates sense of reverence
‘by the gate with star and moon’
‘the bronze snake lay in the sun’

Question 2

View of a pig - start quotes

Answer 2

Title
- creates sense of isolation and detachment

‘the pig lay on a barrow dead’
- end stopped lines creates sense of final ature of death
- like in medallion death is saved till the end of the line ‘inert as a shoelace; dead’

‘it was less than lifeless, further off./ It was like a sack of wheat’
- lacuna

Question 3

Medallion - end quotes

Answer 3

‘the garnet bits burned like that. / dust dulled his back to ochre’
‘knifelike, he was chaste enough, / pure death’s metal.’
‘perfected his laugh’

Question 4

View of a Pig - end quotes

Answer 4

‘how could it be moved? / and the trouble of cutting it up!’
‘its squeal was the rending of metal’

Question 5

Death & Co. - start quotes

Answer 5

Title
- commercialisiation of death
- Heinrich Heine two opposed human natures
‘the one who never looks up whose eyes are lidded’
‘his beaks clap sidewise’
- vulturine image of death as a predator
- contortive, unnatural grotesque nature

Question 6

Examination at the womb door - start quotes

Answer 6

title
- sense that death is innevitable - life is simply a passage towards death
‘who owns these scrawny little feet? Death’
‘given, stolen or held pending trial’
- legalistic: life is a trial that could at any moment end in death
- st peter at the gait: christiainity

Question 7

Death & Co. - end quotes

Answer 7

‘he wants to be loved’
- volta
‘somebody’s done for’
- aphorism - certainty
- death becomes more mystified, more ambivalent by the end of the poem

Question 8

Examination at the Womb door - end quotes

Answer 8

‘who is stronger than hope, Death’
-certainty and consolation of god is replaced by death
- rejection of christianity
‘but who is stronger than death? / Me, evidently. / pass crow’
- making fun of religious rhetoric that god is stronger than death

Question 9

Critics plath

Answer 9

Arthur K Oberg: ‘Death, birth and sex merge’
Constance Scheerer: ‘the quest for the garden of eden and the quest for the lost innocence are never the same quest’

Question 10

Context plath

Answer 10

Heinrich Heine: two opposed human natures
- William Blake life mask
- Gensis 2,7 man made out of clay
- Genisis, 3,19 from dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return

Question 11

Critics Hughes

Answer 11

Dominic Leonard: the poems ‘blunt lucidity and curt sentences’ make ‘any sense of life … seems impossible’
Ted Hughes Society: ‘an ideological challenge to both christianity and humanism’

Question 12

Context Hughes

Answer 12

saint peter at the gaits and typical christian portrayal of death
Plath’s suicide - perhaps he is challenging her notion that death is an enhancement
Lupercal - collection link w romulus - he killed his brother how we romanticise death and murder