Stafford Afternoons Flashcards
(14 cards)
Themes:
Reflective, melancholic, loss of innocence, time
‘So I let a horse in the noisy field sponge at my palm’
-risky moment
-power imbalance
-invasive
-foreshadows the later events through the visceral image created
‘ice-cream van chimed and dwindled away’
-imagery and metaphor of her childhood and her innocence moving away (foreshadows again what is going to happen to her)
-creates a sense of joy and excitement she should feel
-onomatopoeia creates a haunting and ghostly feel to emphasise the later loneliness she will feel
- the ‘long road’ is a metaphor for the spiritual or emotional journey the speaker will be undertaking. She is taking a journey from childhood to adulthood. SYMBOL OF CHANGE
-reinforced by the symbolic ‘ice-cream van’ dwindling chimes, slowly seeping away
-the ‘empty gardens’ suggest a safe world of humans has disappeared and the transition to adulthood is undertaken alone
‘The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole’
-personification of silence creates a threatening atmosphere
-fairytale conventions and the childish terms emphasises her innocence making the loss of it later on even greater
-overwhelming, all consuming nature highlighted through the verbs
-guttural, hard alliteration ‘g’s’ in ‘gulped’ and ‘green’. Showing the deep, dark, dangerous nature of the world
‘The way the trees drew sly faces from light and shade’
-moment of attack from the natural world
-creates and vicious and threatening image
-mixture of light and dark imagery may perhaps be used to signify her childhood (light) and the moment she is about to experience will make her become ‘shaded’ and need to act more adult like (transformative moment from childhood to adulthood)–> inevitability of the event
‘Let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck’
-metaphor
-blurred imagery between nature and human nature (implies the danger is permeated in all aspects of the world)
-also emphasises the persona of innocence and the inability to differentiate the two
-‘sticky breath’ represents an extremely small distance between nature and the body
-‘neck’ is an intimate and vulnerable area, therefore a violation of space is conducted through coming of age (suggests the vulnerability and danger faced)
-wet and too close
-WETNESS
-menace
‘By a silver birch with a living, purple root in his hand’
-metaphor for male genitals implies an innocence to her
-grotesque image of the natural world used to imply the completely harrowing moment for her
-power and growth held by this mystical man (still using fairytale imagery to imply the innocence of the child to heighten the horror of the scene
-ironic contrast between the ‘silver birch’ a beautiful elegant tree and the ‘living, purple root’ of the man’s erection
-significant that them man’s penis is described as a ‘root’ something embedded deep, the evils of the adult world are deeply dangerous and run fully through
-the ONLY italic in the poem forms a dramatic climax in the significant moment. Highlighting the fear and shock the narration would have experienced, forces the reader to share a small portion of that discomfort.
‘Time fell from the sky like a red ball’
-simile indicates the change in time (highlights her loss of innocence)
-the word has caused her to loose her innocence
-fractured perspective to highlight her complete shift from innocence to the harsh realities of adulthood
Context:
-maybe was influence by the incongruous images that Sylvia Plath used in her novels and poetry
-influenced to a degree by surrealism through Duffy’s use of dreams making it out to be a nightmarish reflection
-Fairytale like: to show the innocence of childhood as well as the teaching origins
Critic: Simon Brittan
accuses Duffy of using: ‘simplistic language and overstated imagery’
Structure:
-chronological narrative follows journey through locations acting as a metaphysical journey from innocence to the harsh realities of the adult world
-shift after the attack where the speech became enjambed to highlight the panic and make evident the clear shift in her reality
- the contrast between long and short sentences with the unpredictable rhythm being used to translate the chaos of the moment to the reader. It also reveals the anxious feeling of the girl and the danger that exists in the wood
Summary:
About a child who gets enticed by the silent woods during a lonely afternoon. The way she first encounters danger in the adult world is the story narrated in the symbolic poem.
‘In a cul-de-sac a strange boy threw a stone’
- the cul-de-sac limits the scope of childhood and builds a suburban world that confines her and keeps her safe
-‘strange boy’ is more open ended with a suggestion of indifference: that the speaker is uninterested in the game of throwing or the boy
-may also imply an act of violence that shows the danger involved in the future world
-small act of violence
‘I crawled through a hedge into long grass at the edge of a small wood, lonely and thrilled’
-the speaker embarks on first dangerous journey
-‘long grass’ being used to suggest a wildness, hidden traps?
-description ‘thrilled’ means both excitement but also emotional tremor or shock. Hinting at the escalating danger
-the idea of ‘crawling through a hedge’ has connotations of fairytales notably Alice in Wonderland where the protagonist explores the unknown in a mystical location. Leaving safety of childhood to enter a dangerous but exciting world
