violence and brutality P&H

Question 1

Overall thesis

Answer 1

• both poets present violence as inherent
• however, for Hughes this is because of human nature whereas for plath this is cause by society.
• Hughes presents this violence as external and physical whereas Plath presents it as internal and psychological

Question 2

‘Cut’ - beggining, quotes

Answer 2

‘a flap like a hat, Dead white’
- use of internal rhyme made of monosyllabic words sounds childlike almost like a nursery rhyme implying the speakers childlike fascination
‘Homunculus I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill’

Question 3

‘Mayday on Holderness’ - start quotes

Answer 3

‘Mayday on Holderness’
- adolphe Haberer: the poem is ‘a plea to the other’
‘decomposing leaves’ ‘larvae’ ‘eel, vulture, hyena’
‘‘bog tools, dregs of toad stools, tributary graves, dung hills, kitchens, hospitals’

Question 4

‘Cut’ - end quotes

Answer 4

‘the stain on your gauze / klu klux klan darkens and tarnishes’
‘thumb stump’
- Hannah Advent: the banality of evil: how desensitized we have become to violence

Question 5

Mayday on Holderness - end quotes

Answer 5

‘the north sea lies soudnless, beneath it smoulder the wars’
‘to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet’
‘the expressionless gaze of the leopard’
‘the nightlong frenzy of shrews’
- the further up the food chain you go, the less animalistic we become
- we are losing our human nature

Question 6

‘Daddy’ - start quotes

Answer 6

‘a bag full of god’
‘scraped flat by the rollers of wars wars wars’
‘your neat mustache and your aryan eye bright blue’

Question 7

Bayonet Charge - start quotes

Answer 7

Adolph Haberer: transgressive
- Agree: free verse
- disagree: Wilfred Owen ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’ - sense of disorientation and violence
‘suddenly he awoke and was running’
‘dazzled’ ‘hot khaki, heavy sweat’
‘bullets smacking the belly’

Question 8

Daddy - end quotes

Answer 8

‘you died before i had the time-‘
‘a cleft in your chin instead of your foot’
‘every woman adores a fascist’
‘the brute brute heart of a brute like you’
‘there’s a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you’
- “the poem is spoken by a girl with an electra complex” Sylvia Plath

Question 9

Bayonet Charge - end quotes

Answer 9

‘the cold clockwork of the stars and the nations’
‘King, honnour, human dignity, etcetera
‘terror’s touchy dynamite’

Question 10

Critics Plath

Answer 10

Don Patterson: ‘conflating her own plight with historical calamity (disasters)’

Sylvia Plath: Daddy is ‘spoken by a girl with an Electra complex

Question 11

Context Plath

Answer 11

Banality of Evil: book published in 1961 by Hannah Advent abt Nazi war criminal trials - comment on how desensitized we have become to violence
Klu Klux Klan: 3rd wave when plath is writing
Electra complex: girl wants to kill her mother to be able to get with her father as she is sexually attracted to her father

Question 12

Critics Hughes

Answer 12

• Adolph Haberer: Mayday on Holderness is ‘a plea to the other’
• Adolph Haberer: Hughes’ poetry is ‘transgressive’
• John Press: Hughes ‘pummels his reader into submission’

Question 13

Context hughes

Answer 13

Wilfred Owen: ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’ dulce et decorum est
Lupercal - 1960: Lupercal was Roman festival to celebrate romulus - woolf founder of rome: intrinsic link between human and animals - human nature is animal nature
m’aidez
mayday