Poetry - Analysis Flashcards
(18 cards)
My mother’s hands are all I have
Technique: alliteration
Explanation: emphasise loss of connection - no real depth between them yet in poem.
Her voice rushes through a tunnel the other way from home
Technique: metaphorical language
Explanation: memory of voice is metaphorically rushing away from her - link to separate train stations and distance between them.
A paisley pattern scarf, a brooch, a navy coat
Technique: synecdoche
Explanation: can only remember clothes and not her face - detached, impersonal.
The baby turtles to the massive leatherbacks
Technique: contrast
Explanation: compares her son’s travels and his growth to adulthood to sea turtles - reminder of how far he has come since the Moses basket.
I feel like a home-alone mother
Technique: word choice
Explanation: Pun - usually to be applied to a child. Role-reversal. Emptiness of home.
Wearing your large black slippers, flip-flopping into your empty bedroom
Technique: imagery
Explanation: Just like children playing grown up by trying on clothes. Kay becomes like a child waiting for son to come home.
When she gets the letter she is hopping mad.
Technique: descriptive language
Explanation: Suggests grandmother’s energy.
The sideboard solid as a coffin
Technique: simile
Explanation: suggests this is where the grandmother has pictured herself staying until her life ends.
cemetery… noisy kids
Technique: contrast
Explanation: View has changed from a peaceful one to a noisy wild one - ambiguity - could be about the intrusion of the young and new or the arrival of life - vibrancy.
I want to be in my mother’s house… the other side of the world
Technique: enjambment
Explanation: The speaker craves security. This in turn links her to her daughter. The speaker herself wants her mother to protect her, just as she wants to keep her daughter safe. The idea that this security is to be found among women runs throughout the poem. Her mother, however, is far away from her. This distance which is highlighted by the enjambment between stanzas one and two.
I try and say something to soothe
Technique: sibilance
Explanation: Soft - trying to calm/placate Leila
My voice is a house with the roof blown off
Technique: metaphor
Explanation: A house without a roof has no protection and is open to the elements. The mother attempts to comfort and “soothe” the child, but her voice cannot. Sheer exposure. Struggling to conceal her fear from her child.
Images of war-torn cities from which inhabitants might flee. This may be the woman’s background, the world that she left, like her mother, “over the other side of the world”.
I am sixteen; I’ve never tasted a Bloody Mary
Technique: word choice
Explanation: Emphasises speaker’s youth and inexperience of life - contrasts with her mother’s experience - we get the sense that the mum’s situation bewilders her.
I leave, bags full, Lucozade, grapes, oranges,
sad chrysanthemums
Technique: list
Explanation: stereotypical markers of illness - unburdening mum.
dandelion hours
Technique: metaphor
Explanation: sense of lightness and beauty but also of fragility - little time remaining - easily blown away.
Words fell off my tongue
Technique: personification
Explanation: No control of what happened. Inevitable. The words metaphorically falling off her tongue - surreal and almost grotesque image, recalling the childhood world of fantasy. Kay suggests the words are tangible, physical things, even alive and she continues to portray them as living things for the rest of the poem.
Out in the English soil, my old words buried themselves
Technique: metaphor
Explanation: the word “out” at the beginning emphasises sense of detachment. In this “soil” her words metaphorically “buried themselves”. This continues the image of the words as living things. This suggests they are lying hidden rather than being completely lost - they just need to be found again. Compared to treasure, forcing her to dig into her memory to retrieve them.
I lost my Scottish accent
Technique: metaphor
Explanation: cliché. Suggests accidental loss, like losing something inconsequential.
