In the poem August 6, 1945, the poet Alison Fell used many different language techniques in abundance to reveal her purpose and ideas. Fell used language features such as similes, metaphors, assonances and sibilance to show her thoughts through three points-of-views: through the bombers around the time of impact, a victim of the nuclear bomb immediately after impact, and the bomber’s nightmares of the devastation he had caused. The first two stanzas tell a short perspective of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., just before and just after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. It tells what seems like the nuclear bomb what somewhat something good, happy, and exciting. Fell’s purpose for that section is to give the reader and the audience a false …show more content…
The idea that the audience picks up is the sickening horror that could only be shown through imagery or an actual image. The fourth stanza describes the effects of the bomb on the girl in gruesome detail and plenty of language features. “Later she will walk the dust, a scarlet girl with her whole stripped skin at her heel, stuck like an old shoe sole or mermaid’s tail”. Simile is used once more to give a shocking image of peeling red skin, being dragged across dust and ash. Assonance is use for “old” and “sole”, and “mermaid’s tail” to really focus on the image being transmitted across to the reader. Specific diction was use to select word like “scarlet” to really give a vivid sight that we could all imagine. This perfectly contradicts what was in the first section, where a pleasant sight could make a 180 and turn south really quick. This flows nicely from the relevance of the first section, where Fell actually shows us what the government and the military could really be hiding from …show more content…
“Later in dreams he will look down shrieking and see ladybirds ladybirds.” The purpose of this passage is to finalise how horrible nuclear warfare is. Assonance is used in “dreams”, “shrieking” and “see” to put emphasis on some of the nouns and verbs for how it had impacted the pilot. The repetition of “ladybirds” focuses on the possible image that the pilot saw: “scarlet” red bodies with “black ash”, the colours of a ladybird. As well as that, “ladybird ladybird” is also a reference to a grim English nursery rhyme, and it goes “ladybird ladybird fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone”. The rhyme is incredibly dark, and somehow very relevant and appropriate in the context of nuclear bombs. In the previous section, there was a line “... she will complain ‘Mother you are late, so late’”, and that ties in with the “ladybird ladybird” nursery rhyme how the “Mother” the girl is referring to is in place of the ladybird, but unfortunately didn’t “fly away home” quick enough - perhaps she was caught in the nuclear explosion as well - and now her “children are gone” for real. Maybe this is the reason why military activities are sugar coated before they get exposed to the public. Horrors like this is incredibly bad for one’s mental health, as Fell showed us through the pilot’s dreams, and it is best if we try and
In the first two lines, an aural image is employed to indicate a never-ending anger in the girl's father. Dawe uses onomatopoeia to create a disturbing and upsetting description of his enraged "buzz-saw whine." An annoying, upsetting sound, it gives the impression of lasting ceaselessly. His anger "rose /murderously in his throat." Because "murderously" begins on a new line, a greater emphasis is placed on it and its evil and destructive connotations. An image of a growling lion stalking its prey is evoked in the reader, as it threateningly snarls from its throat. The girl is terrified as it preys on her persistently "throughout the night." Furthermore, because there is no punctuation, these few lines are without a rest, and when reading out aloud, they cause breathlessness. This suggests that the father's "righteous" fury is ceaseless and suffocating the girl.
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
The poem exposure was written by Wilfred Owen in the winter of 1917, it has all the hard ships of the soldiers and how they felt during the war in horrific conditions that led the soldiers to death. Starting with the first stanza Owen uses different types of techniques to influence the reader about world war one conditions. “Our brains ache” is a short sentence to open with, emphasizes that statement, hyperbole and sets tone for the poem. The quotation which illustrates how Owen and the soldiers felt during the war “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...” this this quotation illustrates the hard ships of the soldiers and how they felt. “Winds knive us” is a personification, aggressive metaphor of the weather attacking them. Ellipses in the quotation slows the rhythm down, creates space, pause and waiting, reflecting the content. The whole stanza talks about the soldiers, and the weather conditions, the stanza creates a sense of unbearable and horrendous sites, as the following quotation talks about the effects on soldiers from things around them, “Wearied we keep awake” the use of alliteration, emphasizes the desperation to stay awake despite the tedium also causes the reader to reflect on what is being said. The soldiers have to stay awake during the war and there is no sleep for them. “But nothing happens” is repeated four times in the poem, it highlights the boredom and tedium of the reality. This is worse, in many respects, than fear of fighting.
I think the canary symbolized Mrs. Wright. Mrs. Hale describes her; "She -- come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself - real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and - fluttery. How - she - did - change"; and like a bird, Mrs. Wright even sang in a choir. But after she got married, every thing stopped. She didn't sing anymore or attend social functions. Like a bird, her house became her cage. The only happiness that she appears to have is with this bird. The bird probably sang when she could not. He was probably a companion to her, she had no children. And like her, he was also caged. Because we do not know, we can only guess that her husband killed her bird. If he killed the bird then he would have killed the only thing that was important to her. He killed her once when he married her and caged her in that house, and he killed her again when he destroyed her bird. "No,. Wright wouldn't like the bird - a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too." When Mrs. Wright was used to its singing and her world became quiet again, it was too much for her take.
The story is about a 10-year-old Jewish boy’s journey escaping from an orphanage to find his parents. The author “Morris Gleitzman” uses different figurative language like personification and onomatopoeia to create a mood and a better image in the reader’s mind. Figurative language is a language that’s used by authors to create a special effect in the novel to express phrases that don't mean as they first appear to mean. Examples of figurative languages are similes, metaphors, onomatopoeias, personifications etc. Personification is when the author gives an unhuman object human characteristics. It has an effect of creating an image in the reader's mind. An example of personification in the novel is: “a few thin needles of daylight are stabbing through the dark.” (p.86) In this sentence, the needles are personified to stab. And it doesn’t mean that thin needles are actually stabbing Felix, but it means that it is almost morning and the light is shining through the curtains like a thin needle. As the author used personification in the novel, he also used onomatopoeia to create a mood. Onomatopoeia is when the author expresses sounds using words like: Boom, Bam etc. An example of onomatopoeia in the novel is: “Bang, the bedroom door is kicked open.” In this sentence, the example of onomatopoeia is “bang.” Onomatopoeia is used here by the author is because the author wants to create a mood to the story. The mood of being nervous and worried. The author used both personification and onomatopoeia in the novel to create an image in the reader’s mind and to create a
Post 1900 War Poetry By looking at several war poems written before and after 1900, I can see that many elements of the types of poetry change greatly in several ways. I will be looking at a selection of war poems written by three different poets, in chronological order, so as to see if the attitudes to war and writing styles change over time or during various stages of the war. Firstly I will be looking at a poem written by Alfred Tennyson about the charge against the Russian gunners in 1854. The poem is called "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as it is exactly what happened.
The females begin responding “stiffly” rather than “quietly”(7) as before. This adjective usage serves to support the speech even more by allowing readers to see the progression from silence to a bold rebellion in the women regarding their husbands, for “by hiding the canary Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are also going against their husbands” (Bee2). Indeed, this act was the major act of defiance that secured the women’s strengthened devotions to each other rather than their husbands. Peters especially undergoes a drastic transformation when she eventually joins in as “support of her fellow oppressed women” (Block B 1). When, at the climax of the story, the bird is hidden from the men in the sentimental tin box, Glaspell exhibits the tension with the selection of detail. She chooses to focus on the clammy hands of Mrs. Peters as she stuffs the tin away and the quivering voice of Mrs. Hale as she denies knowing any information about the crime. The descriptions of the seemingly miniscule and weakening objects around her house match the “quiet desperation” (Schotland 3) Foster repressed until it overflowed the night before. Considering that the adjectives show how burdensome it is for the women to conceal the evidence, it truly demonstrates how strong the relationships between them has grown based
The imagery of the war creates a strong picture in the reader's mind. “Men lie, covering dirt”, this line of poetry allows the readers to go into the war and picture the events going on. Evergreen much like Wilfred Owen writes with such strong imagery to allow the reader to explore the poem with all five senses, in doing so the readers will get to hear, see, taste, feel,
Bird usually portrays an image of bad luck that follows afterwards and in this novel, that is. the beginning of all the bad events that occur in the rest of the novel. It all started when Margaret Laurence introduced the life of Vanessa MacLeod. protagonist of the story, also known as the granddaughter of a calm and intelligent woman. I am a woman.
The birds show symbolism in more than one way throughout the text. As the soldiers are travelling from all over the world to fight for their countries in the war, the birds are similarly migrating for the change of seasons. The birds however, will all be returning, and many of the soldiers will never return home again. This is a very powerful message, which helps the reader to understand the loss and sorrow that is experienced through war.
the early days through to the end of the war and explain how the texts
In Birdsong, Faulks considers the idea of the War as an ‘exploration of how far men can be degraded’ in terms of the impact that war had upon the individual characters, resulting in dehumanisation. The main feature of being human is individuality. During his three-day-rest, the character Jack reflects that each soldier had the potential to be an individual, but because of the ‘shadow of what awaited them, [they] were interchangeable’ which is an allusion towards the politics of the War; the men were simply seen as statistics. The men search for a fate within the War, demonstrated when Stephen plays cards with the men and claims that Weir would rather have a ‘malign providence than an indifferent one’ which suggests that the men want to feel that someone is planning their future. During a heavy bombardment, Faulks describes that Tipper’s ‘iris lost all light and sense of life’ during his ‘eruption of natural fear’ when the shells land near him. The eyes here are a metaphor for life; it is a human’s eyes which represent individuality and are often described as the window to the soul. Faulks’ description of the loss of light in the eyes suggests that, as a result of the War, Tipper has lost what makes him human. The natural fear and ‘shrill demented sound’ that arises from Tipper is a ‘primitive fear’ which su...
"A man wading lost fields breaks the pane of flood" which starts the second section gives the effect of pain and hurt. The man survives by going along with nature and resisting it, but it also gives the effect of danger at the same time. " Like a cut swaying" carries on the effect of being deliberate, sharp and precise and "it's red spots" and "his hands grub" continues with the theme of the animal sort of.
This lulls the reader into a false sense of security, perhaps unwittingly expecting a much more upbeat and cheerful tale of war. Also, throughout the poem, the meter is iambic pentameter, with the exception of the last line that only has three feet. This abrupt ending to the poem is much like the sudden deaths of young boys fighting in the war. Suffering is clear, because even before any action occurs, the soldiers are described like hags or beggars, despite their youth. Furthermore, their movements are described as slow, despite German artillery firing behind them. This contrasts the idealization of war that encouraged young men to join the army. Additionally, in lines 9 and 10, fear is clear in the battle when Owen writes “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys—an ecstasy of fumbling,/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time” (Stallworthy 188). Moving at such a rapid pace from fear shows a sharp contrast to the previous elderly, slow image of the boys, and demonstrates the terror associated with poison gas. The remaining lines in the poem describe a boy whose helmet was not on in time. The image of this boy still haunts the speaker of the poem, which is evident in lines 15 and 16: “In all my dreams, before my helpless
The poem begins with the phrase “eight birds were hatched in one nest” (ln. 1), she relays to the reader that she had eight children born at home. She also states that “four cocks” and “hens the rest” representing that she had four sons and four daughters. During the seventeenth century this was a rare occurrence for a woman to successfully carry and give birth to eight children, and for all of them to live into adulthood (Mlinko 127). Due to the harsh circumstances of life during this time most children did not survive to reach their first birthday, and childbirth was considered a dangerous event for a woman to go through. Many woman and infants died during childbirth due to complications that in today’s world are easily taken care of. She describes the love, care, and protection she gave them by using the terms “soft and warm,” and “with my wings kept off harm” (ln. 58). Bradstreet also uses the terms “take flight” to describe when her children left home, and “farewell, my birds”(ln. 93) when she knew her time on earth would end. This poem is also written as a couplet, or two line, Rhyme Scheme with the patterns of (AA, BB, CC, & DD). This rhyme scheme is one of the easiest to read in poetry because it flows easily like the lyrics of a