Terrible Angels

Themes: war and the effect it has on people

Links to: Larkin's MCMXIV

title is a paradox/oxymoron in itself

"horses to bolt and flocks of meat-snatching birds to rise" - a cycle - vultures -> pick at the dead - violent imagery

First stanza - shows how we view war as heroic, a tribute to their country, "his war medals, their pretty coloured ribbons" - then the second stanza shows us what war is really like from a war veteran's perspective

"When they spoke it was the silence of gas" - sibilance - gas was a silent killer - violent/deadly

"when they sang it was shrapnel striking helmet" - sibilance - whatever they did something bad happened - violent imagery

"finally, soldiers' prayers and soldiers' screams" - "finally" - their death was inevitable/ bound to happen - build up to their deaths - contrast of two different deaths - religious and violent

"thrilled the cold angels to steal the muskets of the dead" - angels wouldn't usually be "thrilled" by death - "cold angels" - paradox/oxymoron - death - "steal" - crime - angels are seen as innocent and pure - still even in death they are trying to fight, to win

"to become stealthily visible" - paradox/oxymoron - stealing the dead's muskets makes them "stealthily visible" - careful but wants them to be seen?

"bold and bloodthirsty" - alliteration - animalistic qualities have arose in their death - lost morale - no longer civilised - violent imagery

"true facsimiles of men" - "facsimiles" -> exact copy - this is what they were like when they were alive but when they died and became angels this has awakened their "bloodthirsty" nature that was already within them - because they're now invisible they don't have to hide that side of themselves

Last stanza - he come back from war injured and now is trapped in his home - reliving what he saw and what he went through - seeing it repeatedly over and over again - war has left him weak and unhealthy - he remembers more about it as he keeps seeing it

In The Theatre

Recounting a true story

the patient was still awake while the doctor was searching in his brain for a tumour/growth

"small voices, small lies" - making everything else seem insignificant - he's too a lie, he's not "fine"

"blink again and again" - every time he blinks he feels pain because of what Dr Lambert Rogers is doing to him only under general anaesthesia for brain surgery

"rash as blind's man" - doctor can't see what he's touching in his brain - violent language - he can't see the effects of what he's doing to the patient - he can only see "inside his soft brain"

"If items of horror can make a man laugh then laugh at this" - "horror" connotes violence and being terrified - if a man laughs at something horrible then this is another level of horror

irregular rhyme scheme could relate to the patient's in-and-out consciousness or the irregularity of the procedure he is undergoing

"ticking its own wild time" - under so much pressure - frantic - feeling so much pain

"more brain mashed" - violent - constantly played with - his brain being poked/pushed about

doctor is "desperate" - its already been an hour - he really wants to find the growth/mass

"probe's braille path" - broiled is something blind people use to read - the doctor is using his brain as path for his probe to find the tumour but he can't see - going in 'blind'

the doctor is in a rush and "thinking 'Christ!' Two more on the list" - he's been trying to fin this tumour for an hour and he has two ore patients to operate on after this

"the cracked record in the brain" - the patient has had enough - he can't take the pain of what the doctor's doing anymore

he says "leave my should alone" in a "ventriloquist voice" - he can't physically speak it because he's in so much pain so he's saying it to himself in his mind

"patient's dummy eyes" - could suggest a ventriloquist dummy or that the doctor is treating him as his own personal dummy to experiment on

"the patient's eyes too wide" - doctor's gone too far - he feels so much pain its unbearable - serious as the doctor is "shocked" by this

"nurses, students, sister petrified" - viewing gallery - loads of people are watching the horrible surgery - "petrified" - strong violent imagery - shocking

"that voice so arctic" - his blood turning cold - his body is shutting down - he's loosing his life - "that cry so odd" - he doesn't recognise himself anymore - no longer himself - dying

"the words began to blur and slow" - he's slowing dying/fading away - "leave my soul alone" repeated many times shows its importance to him and how the patient doesn't want the doctor to keep doing this to him that his soul breaks - wants his soul to remain intact - he needs it in order to go to heaven - religious imagery

"And silence matched the silence under snow" - he's finally gone after all he went through - his pain is over - "snow" connotes purity, innocence, angelic, heavenly - everything is clear now - he still has is soul - in heaven?

The Boasts of Hywell ab Owain Gwynedd

Religious imagery - "I praise the Lord", "dry old hymns"

"Sunday, skilled in zealous verse" - sibilance

"her" being on it's own line emphasises her importance to him

describes her using fruits - "my peach of a woman", "rosy apple skin" - sweet, perfect

"me vegetarien diet" - vegetarians have everything but meat - they have everything but marriage - not keeping their relationship/love a secret

he's always trying to impress her - "dry old hymns I steal to please her", "I kneel to ease her"

"sweet riot" - paradox/oxymoron - he knows it's wrong but it feels right

Final Stanza - he can't control himself or his feelings for her

"efflorescence" - their love blooming/growing stronger

"let her name be secret for her husband's sake" - repetition of "her" here emphasis that she is the one who is married - they're having an affair?

"be sure my busy tongue keeps quiet" - he wants it to remain a secret but he has such strong feelings for her

The Malham Bird

first section in the past
"(For Joan)" - his wife

"that long summer a clarity of marvels" - even though he's experienced something life changing "no morning news announced the great world had been reinvented" - his life has changed but no-one knows it

"more than together" - they're just together because of their love it transcends that


now into the present
"three grandchildren later"

comparing his wife to the "malham of eden" - the only bird that was allowed to stay in Eden - symbol of pure goodness - the other birds "pecked the forbidden fruit"- she is a paragon of good

"lonely immortal forever winging over the banished gardens of Paradise" - important and sad final image - we think of her as this good peaceful but alone

"the tame seagull" and the "friendly gull" could also be compared to her too

means of the sea - the sea is endless and his love for her is endless and will last forever

A Figure of 8

a criticism of the education system

as a child he felt like he was in a prison "jail" and when he left the classroom he's "free"

his imagination is contained in the classroom and then we see the contrast when he leaves the classroom as his imagination runs wild - the power of imagination in a child

in his imagination he "flies to Africa" and gets involved in a battle, someone "bombed the park" and he sees "a spaceship" - this occurs on his walk home from school - turns ordinary objects into these amazing imaginative things

"fuck winnie the pooh" - the classroom isn't allowing his imagination to soar as it should and his imagination is on fined to childish things


Could link to Larkin's A Study of Reading Habits 

A Wall

interesting because the title becomes part of the first line

even though we don't understand things sometimes like why a wall is randomly there -  "begins in no reason ends no place" it can still be "beautiful" - in this way he could either be talking about life or religion

quite a philosophical poem - how life can be "seaming unremarkable" - it can be beautiful and our faith is an amazing thing

The Death of Aunt Alice

Juxtaposing her vivid, wild imagination of her life with a very orderly contained funeral service

"sparrows became vampires"  she had a vivid imagination - used to make things up

dreamt up some amazing scenarios - "fords on the M4 upside down"

she died - her funeral didn't reflect her personality - death can't capture a person's personality

contrast between her wild imagination and the finality of her death - she's not here anymore - gone forever

Abse imagines her in heaven telling more "tall stories" to saints in heaven

religion is the save and grace of the poem - through a belief in God he finds solace in his aunt's death

Imitations

Snow in April - "surprised April" - things happening out of sequence - unnatural - unexpected

"snowflakes" - could be blossom and he's seeing something that isn't actually there - imagining there to be snow - illusions

"he is my chameleon, my soft diamond, my deciduous evergreen" - his son is something that can be molded  - 'diamond' he's precious to him - something he prides himself of having

"immortal Spring time" - rebirth and things cycles - family cycles

going back into the past - when he was a teenager with his father - " I his duplicate" - a memory of how he is like his father - 'duplicate' relates to 'my chameleon' - father and son - a son adopts the traits of their father

seeing "two white butterflies" causes him to recall the past in the present - represents him and his father

"butterflies" - only live for a day - fleeting - you will die but the cycle keeps going on like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly - links to deciduous evergreen" - the leaves are shed but the tree will always be there

Abse is like the tree and his son is one of the leaves - he will have children - more leaves not he tree - strong image

The Mistake

people wanting to believe that something is true

"disguise" - about people hiding behind lies - not being honest and forcing themselves to believe things are true when they'r not

look closet - the tree is just a tree - "its not ashamed" - its ashamed of its nature

"shamelessly free of disguise" - the tree doesn't care whether its considered a "treasure"  or if its exotic or something to be boasted about - it just wants to be true to itself 

Links to Larkin's Sunny Prestatyn 

The Game

Abse is at a football match

Everything is black and white - "good" and "evil" - no in-between

A lot of religious imagery to back up this idea of "good vs. evil"

"the very name sad as the old songs" - the idea that we will always be trapped in this same cycle and not able to let go of the past - remembering the past through music

"fans guess the result halfway through" - represents how like life we can guess what's going to happen - they are depressed because they know the reality of life

"the honest team dribbles ineffectively" - the team that are honest don't get anywhere 

"trampled" - aggressive, violent imager - how life beats you down

"natural the dark" - the idea that evil wins because "dark" connects with evil

Down the M4

because his wife died in a car crash not he M4 he associates the M4 with death

"scared to hear my mother's news" - Abse is afraid to her about another person's death is afraid to hear"mother's face is in her ninth decade" - scared about time running out - the inevitability of death - can feel death coming for him and his mum - he doesn't want to say how old she is -ninety- scares him because death is unescapable

"her friends are disrobed" - post-mortem but the single line is confusing until you read the next line

"the hole" - grave - talks around death - never direct about it - doesn't want to confront death head-on

"too" - repetition - shows that it keeps happening, and his increasing fear

"monotonous story of clocks" - "clocks" represent time-  the inevitability of death 

"hair turning grey" - ageing, again time passing

"perishable" - dying

"the tawe ran fluent" - water rushing indicates the natural passing of time

"his mother's mother" - looking back at people that are now gone - his mother will eventually die

"you're no Jewess" - history of discrimination - insulting

"under the M4 again" - cycle of life - poem begins and ends with him being on the M4

"the bridges leap over me then shrink in my side mirror" - represent his life - ageing and how life disappears

"and God further than all distance known" - feels such a distance from religion because its not bringing him any comfort - people are continuously dying - God is killing the people he loves

"like the tune my mother knows it won't keep" - just like that won't last - his life won't last

feels disconnected from religion and that everything is transitory, fleeting

Return to Cardiff

Themes: place/home/journey

Links to Abse's Down the M4 and On The Coast

              Larkin's Here

Abse has "an affection" for the city he lives in -> shows he has strong feelings for his hometown

Stanza 1 - 2nd and 3rd line -> reference to his childhood memories -> "my first botched love affair" -> teenage life and the difficulties he's had with relationships (this quote also links to Abse's Blonde Boys)

"a raid on mislaid identities" -> he's lost sight of who they are his perceptions of them have changed

"the mile-wide Taff now a stream" -> when he was younger everything seemed 'larger than life'

"joiners façade" -> everything was simple that he could turn into a game - a different place to what it actually is

"white" -> in reference to Abse's grandfather -> white suggests innocence and purity

Stanza 4 -> he loves the place he imagined it to become but how he doesn't recognise it - " a city of strangers, alien and bleak"

"waterscapes that wonder" -> alliteration

"uneasily diverted by mere sense of reflections" -> his love for Cardiff hasn't changed even though what he envisioned is different to how it is now (how it turned out)

"dark playground" -> reference to his childhood - the memory is fading slowly to black 

"gunshots" -> connotes violence

"illusory" and "real" -> shows a juxtaposition between his memories and how the same place is very different before he moved away -> only thing left is the smell

"the other Cardiff had gone" -> using "no sooner than I'd arrived" suggests that almost straight away he had noticed the change and that Cardiff wasn't the same

He is constantly being reminded of the "old Cardif" by small things but they were important things to him

"the boy I was not and the man I am not met" -> the two people he thought he was (he's not anymore) -> represents the two fazes of his life that are in Cardiff

"then walked out" -> shows that he knows that both he and Cardiff have both changed