'The Planners' Revison Flashcards
Who wrote ‘The Planners’?
Boey Kim Cheng
Where is Cheng from and why is the poem personal to him?
Singapore. The poem is personal to him because he saw the effects of urbanisation in Singapore.
What does ‘They’ convey in the poem?
‘They’ conveys an anonymous, faceless identity and the disconnect that the speaker feels with ‘The Planners’.
Why is a semantic field of dentistry used?
It is a metaphor for getting rid of old, useless buildings like chipping off teeth and replacing them with new, shiny ones. “knock off useless blocks with dental dexterity. All gaps are plugged with gleaming gold. The country wears perfect rows of shining teeth.”
What language device is “So history is new again”?
An oxymoron. It conveys the irony of ‘The Planners’ destroying history only to replace it.
What sort of imagery is used in the first stanza of the poem?
Battle imagery of urbanisation vs nature. “Even the sea draws back and the skies surrender.”
What language device is ‘Anesthesia, amnesia, hypnosis”?
Tricolon, a group of three that has emphasis and effect.
