Checking out me history and island man comparison.
“Checking out me history” is all about the writer wanting to learn about his past. Instead, he is being taught all about the history of white people. He keeps reciting facts that he has learnt. Some of the facts most English children would have learnt whilst they are in school, and some of the facts he has been taught outside of school, probably by his parents.
The poem seems like it is a rant to the schooling system and the politics of the country. This may be why there is no punctuation in this poem. It is a way to rebel against the teachers. At school the teachers are always telling you to check your spelling and punctuation, and he is disagreeing with the way and things he is
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This, along with a large amount of enjambment makes the poem flow easily. It seems like it is a few longs lines, rather than five stanzas! When you read the poem aloud the sound makes you think of waves in the sea, going back and forth. In the first stanza, there is a lot of sibilance – repeating of the sound “s”. This sounds a lot like the waves.
In the first stanza, the fourth line is slightly different to the other lines. It tells you he is not in real life, because it is in his head, which suggests he is dreaming. In the second and third lines, there is enjambment, but this is where it stops. It confuses the reader, because without the fourth line, he is actually on his island, but when you read the fourth line you realise he is dreaming. The confusion reminds me of waking up in the morning, when you think you are still dreaming but then you realise you are not dreaming.
At the end of the first stanza, the poet says “the steady breaking and wombing”. Steady breaking reminds you of the waves breaking on the beach on a nice clear morning, which implies it is a good memory. The word “wombing” is very rarely used in everyday life. It means to be doing nothing, being oblivious to the outside world. In addition, it implies protection and comfort. Before a baby is born, it lives in the mother’s womb, where the mother protects it and comforts. The womb is the baby’s home, although only for a short while. When the
The lack of punctuation in the poem lets it run freely, again, this could reflect on the characters feelings of wanting to be free and live naturally on an island. The irregular lengths and placing of lines is to form a visual pattern resembling the shore and tide.
Throughout the poem the tone and harmony is showing many different moods including shyness, anger and calmness. An example of shyness is at the start of the poem “softy, silently it swishes”, an example of anger is in the middle of the poem “it thumps, it sprays it rips at shores, its ozone spray”, and finally at the end of the poem calmness is shown, “it spends its strength, it sings, it sighs. The wave recedes”. One aspect of the poem I find intriguing is the alliteration and personification. For example, “it sighs, it sings, it seeks”.
Poems are built with tradition, but in his case, the speaker wants to end tradition just as he wants to end racism. In line two and three, they both end with the same word which is called symploce. Symploce is a combination of anaphora and epistrophe which implies that these two lines are an important point of the figure of speech. The poem was written by stating a cause and effect. The line beginng with by is the cause and I being the effect. Its an explination of how he will fight social injustice. It also helps readers to use and understand the most effective way to fight social
The third stanza which marks the middle of the poem begins, "The Ocean said, Come flow freely with me" with ten syllables written in pentameter accompanied by iambic, spondee and trochee syllables. A steady rhythm in meter is noted in the next four lines which declines to trimeter for all four lines. Line fourteen, "and the creatures in my seas." contains pyrrhic, trochee and anapestic syllables. The fifteenth line in trimeter, "Here your tears will disappear," contains for the first time in the poem, a dactyllic syllable accompanied by the iambic syllable. Line sixteen, "and your worries will cease." contains again the iambic syllable now accompanied by the pyrrhic syllable. The last line in the series of trimeter lines is line seventeen which states, "Be the element that I need.". concludes the metered pattern. In lines fourteen through seventeen the meter is measured the same, however there is a new element added to the syllables previously used in the beginning stanzas. The repeated trimeter is suggestive of familiar situation but the new syllable is
The first stanza, which contains the son’s childish speech, is short, only three lines. However, by the stanza which contains the son’s angry talkback, the stanza is double in length, having four lines. Each line represents a literal level of maturity and growth that the son has gained. As time moves on, he is able to gain more and more experience in life. As his experience accumulates over time, so does his hostility. His terse, childish begging for his father to simply read another story turns to an angry speech about how he no longer beleievs in his father as an authority figure. Despite this, the son’s psyche changes back, as all this maturation is played out in the father’s head, and when he returns, he is back to his childish self, bu this stanza is the longest in the poem. This suggests that when someone is able to mature enough, they are able to comprehend more of the world than they did before, and are able to act
The poem is formed of eight stanzas, each one is six lines long except for the fifth stanza which is an octet. The stanzas are formed of sets of three rhyming couplets in the
The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.
The mood of this poem is very soothing and is a sense of relaxation and security. Grace Nichols is showing that the island mans first home is the Caribbean. “the steady breaking and wombing.” The word “wombing” is a made up word by the writer. It has many associations but it makes us the readers imagine a place of comfort and security but more importantly a sense of home and belonging. The reason why this image is put in to the readers mind is because babies grow in the mothers’ womb, so we could say that the womb is everyone’s “first home”. The word ‘wombing’ can also mean his mother land.
With a few exceptions, the poem primarily follows the form of accentual-syllabic verse. The majority of lines are composed of three syllables, most often two unstressed and one stressed. Using a combination of structural technique and descriptive language, Williams emphasizes the action of visual perception.
These lines use enjambment for the effect of the lines flowing into each other to make it seems like the sea. The first half flows smoothly, as does the second half, except for the final word. The letter "S" is used in both halves to bring them together - to remind the readers of Islands Man closeness to the sea. The letter "H" ("head") is a break from the "S's" and therefore the rhythm is lost. The third line ("to the sound of blue surf") has alliteration of the letter "S". The sound of this letter is very much like that of the waves to remind the reader of the sea. To insure that this comes across to the readers there is emphasis on these letters. There is also an emphasis on the word "head" here to make the readers realize that it is only in Island Man's head, as he also realizes the truth.
The structure of the last three stanzas leaves us hanging from each one. If there was a song to this as music would rise in volume and pitch at each of the final stanza lines. If you read the poem right, the lines seem to echo in your head and slow your progress to the next stanza.
Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than
The poem does not follow a rhyme scheme or meter, which means that there is rhythm in the poem and it makes the poem more like a song. The poem has four stanza’s and has five lines within each stanza.
There is a rhythm throughout the poem with strong rhyme, this pattern is like heavy breathing you have when you try to go to sleep it could also represent the rhythmical counting of sheep.
Stanza four introduces the "Bell" as a metaphor for the heavens, and goes on to say that "Being (is), but an Ear". The bell is representative of a church bell, and all the mourners (Beings) are listening to its ring. The use of the word bell in the poem’s context forms a vision of a slow ringing church bell, characteristic to a funeral. The next line, of the fourth stanza, pairs up the poet and silence as castaways. They are strangers in a foreign place, and are all alone. One could infer from the poem that "here" represents purgatory. This