The Flood

The Flood Broadly speaking, the answers in the title: its about a flood, witnessed by the poets speaker as he stands on Lolham Briggs, a viaduct couplet in Clares native Northamptonshire, crossing the flood quetch of the River Welland. Clare describes the military force of the flood in three stanzas, separately of them a sonnet, the tightlipped organisation of the sonnet form providing a tension with the awing and uncontainable power of the flood itself. The lack of baronial syntax, common in Clare, means that the reader has to supply the sense units to deduce meanings, but the equivocalness is often fruitful. In the opening lines, for example, in paradoxical and lonely mood could call run through either forward-moving to the speaker, or backwards to the setting on Lolham Briggs. In the scratch stanza, the poet watches as the flood beats against the arches of the noseband below. Both the link up and the flood itself are lightly personified: the bridge breasted ravi ng waves, as it withstands the terrifying power with a shudder. rendering dominates over either implied meaning until the last line of the stanza, where Clare draws a comparison betwixt the movement of the water (at one here and now clean-cut eddies, at the next engulphed in the general social movement), and military worldly concern life, inexorably swallowed up by death.

The syntactical ambiguity continues in the second stanza, as the wrecky stains could apply either to the eddies of earth-stained flood water, or to death itself. This verse continues the description with a more nice focus, observing t hings the likes of straws and feathers float! ing, turning and being borne away on the stream, seeming as faireys whisked [them] from the view. By the end of the stanza, more substantial things ripped down by the storm - bushes, fence demolished rails - are seen loaded with weeds, like water monsters. In the third stanza, as at the end of the second, the gyre motion of the flood water is captured through the mid-line breaks: Waves trough - ricochet - and force boil...If you want to get a full essay, sight it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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