Faith Healing Flashcards
(18 cards)
About
Uses the meeting of a faith healer to explore the gluability of the faithful
“ slowly the woman file to where he stands”
-File evokes slow obedient almost processional movement like a ritual or a pilgrimage
-This is a solemn approach suggesting faith or desperate hope
-They go to him he’s a beacon they are not equal to him
“ upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, dark suit white collar”
The money is subscribed with formal almost clerical imagery
-The description suggests authority and cleanliness
-But it could represent a costume
-He’s respectable and evokes trust
“ Within those warm spring rain of loving care each dwell some 20 seconds”
The metaphor of warm spring reign of loving care evokes nurture and renewal
-Suggest suggesting that people feel momentarily comforted
-But by the frame 20 seconds hits hits to help breath and perhaps superficial the actual healing is
-It’s also undercut by Larkins use of garment from care to each dwell in 20 seconds
-The precise measurement showing that far from approving like views the ritual as fraud
“ now dear child, what’s wrong? The deep American voice demands.”
It’s patronising yet tender creating a power imbalance
- He’s the healer and they are needy
-The question is both caring and cynical
-Part of a routine not an invitation to real dialogue
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“ directing God about this eye that knee”
It’s subtly ironic as he directs God like a doctor ordering treatment
-The verbs of demands and direct show the man’s arrogance and the way he blesses them abruptly
-And how the other than exiled
-It suggests mechanical formulaic prayer not spiritual depth
-Like you may be critiquing the performance aspects of religious healing
“ like losing thoughts, they go in silence”
The simply likes the women to leaving to fading memories
-Suggesting their experiences are fleeting or un substantial
-It suggests that the preacher forgets about them the second they are gone
-Even when they are still caught up in the rapture
-So I seen as lost like stray sheep in the Bible
-All this cried loudly
-He explores his out pouring of grief in a long sentence which is not resolved until we reach the word wrong as he shows these peoples initial joy turned to wrong
“ a different kind of dumb an idiot child within them still survives”
The unsettling image captures the raw childlike vulnerability awakened by the healers touch
-It shows how some deep part of their emotional self craves love and comfort
-He suggests the experience arouse in each of them and in a child
-Who responds to the apparent kindness of the preacher
“ that hands have come to lift and lighten”
-The metaphor suggests relief and grace and spiritual healing
-Even if the healing isn’t real, the illusion of care creates a powerful emotional response
-Someone has come to light in the burden of their lives
-Making them cry uncontrollably
“ a crowd of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice”
Suggest unspoken pain and longing
-Their emotional release isn’t about healing specific injuries but expressing lifelong hunger for love care and meaning
“ The thick tongs blot their eyes squeeze grief”
His description of the shopping women is graphic and ugly as if they discussed him
-Which as an atheist they probably do
- however the stanza ends with a hyphen leading to the next to indicate that this belief in divine grace brought about by the preacher is about to be undermined
“ What’s wrong!”
He opens the stands with an echo the preachers question but at this time with an exclamation
-He now starts to give his judgement. We reach the crescendo.
- He think goes on to explain what he sees is wrong about the whole charade
“ moustache in flowers frocks”
Again, his discussed is revealed in the unkind if realistic image of the woman
-The mood has changed
“ and everyone that sleeps a sense of life lived according to love”
Like and implies that everyone earns to live a life defined by love
-Whether by giving it or receiving it
-The line elevate the poem to a universal meditation or human need
-His shift from the perspective from describing the women objectively to reflecting on what he’s watching to a more universal observation
-He returned to his early idea of a sleeping in a self “ the child within them”
-Whose life is guided by love
-But it is only a sense of life lived it may not be real
-The sense manifest itself to some as living your life through loving others
-Although Larkin seems not to place much store by that neither here nor in his personal life
“ all they might have done had they been loved?”
It’s devastating
-Like in suggests that many of these women never received the love they needed
-And the lack has shaped their entire lives
-Reflecting personal emotional deprivation
“ nothing cures”
He suggests that the feelings of disappointment and failing to live up to their possibilities is a sickness in the bleak short sentence
-It is incurable not faith not ritual not prayer can undo the damage of emotional neglect
“ an immense slackening ache as when thawing the rigid landscape weeps”
-he further describes this realisation to an extended simile to the throwing of ice
-Now the liquid flowing like their tears
-It’s powerful and poetic comparing emotional release to a frozen landscape thawing
-The weeping is both physical and metaphorical showing grief has been buried or frozen for years
-Could represent the relief they feel as the attention gives them emotional release as they believe he cares finally they can admit their emotions
-The things that he says are false with the emotions are real
-showing the opposition between the words of the healer and the start reality of emotions released in his presence 
“ dear child all time is disproved”
-ironic and tragic
-The healers comforting phrase is undone by real
-Suggests that life has failed to offer the love faith or comfort their religion promises
-Above all they hear the voice whether of the preacher of God is deliberately ambiguous calling to this in a child
-Liking of course does not believe this saving his expression for his disbelief to the last annihilating phrase
-Their lives overtime have shown them that they are not a child to anyone or anything
-It’s an imaginary voice
-If time is disproved the possibility of real love cannot be cured
-The things that he says are false, but the emotions are real
