Shooting Stars Essay- Menace

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2001 Section C- Poetry Question 9: Choose a poem that deals with menace. Show how the poet achieves this and discuss how it adds to your appreciation of the poem. In your answer you should refer to at least two of: mood, theme, imagery, sound, or any other appropriate feature. Shooting Stars. By Carol Anne Duffy. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Shooting Stars’ is a poem in which a sense of menace is effectively portrayed. Duffy uses the situation of Nazi persecution of the Jewish people to underline this. Duffy’s use of an ambiguous title, together with her imagery and effective word choice effectively explores this mood of menace the Jewish people suffered and fully develops the theme of the holocaust. The poem’s title ‘Shooting Stars’ creates a sense of ambiguity. The general connotations applied to this phrase are [create an image of that of a falling star or perhaps the beauty and brightness of fireworks. However it is not until we reach the actual content of the poem that we realise that the stars in question are those Stars of David, a well known Jewish symbol and for the ‘Shooting’ we later realise its dark meaning, the shooting which was endured during the holocaust. Duffy establishes the darkness and menace of the Holocaust immediately in the first line of the poem in the phrase: ‘After I no longer speak’. Here Duffy creates an incredibly strong image of silence and death this creates a vivid mood. The horror is continued in the image created by ‘they break our fingers’ and there is in this the onomatopoeia of the sound of snapping bones as ‘wedding rings’ are ‘salvaged’ for profit. Here again the poet uses the two conflicting images of the wedding band, a symbol of eternal love and theft and profit through death. This adds to the first impression the reader is given, which is that any piece of happiness like for example the wedding
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