wh auden

"The strength of Collective Man"

sept 1st
exploitation of power by authoritative figures
capitalisation + symbolism

"Romantic lie in the brain... lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky"

sept 1s
exploitation of power by authoritative figures
antanclasis juxtaposition of romantic lie and lie of authority

"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter"

epitaph
exploitation of power by authorative individuals
irony, satiricial voice

"and when he cried the little children died in the streets"

epitaph
exploitation of powe by authoratitve figures
double entendre - ambiguity / 2 faced ness of institutions
inversion of emotions
irony

For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Unions shows it was sound)

unknown
authority exploitation
parenthesis
chiasmus

political elegy

unknown
elegy = lamenting the dead
satire/mocking tone to show the exploitation of power that has lead to the on existence of the anonymous citizens

"no one cheered and nothing was discussed"

shield
exploitation of authoritative figures
polyptoton --> accumulates blind submission to authority

"Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired"

unknown
conformity and loss of individuality
rhyming couplet
monotony

"When there was peace, he was peace, when there was war, he went."

unknown
conformity
anaphora

"Was he free? Was he happy?" The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard"

unknown
conformity
hypophora - laughbale to consider that the individual was free in any sense

"a million eyes, a million boots / Without expression waiting for a sign"

shield
conformity
repetition
synecdoche for war
soldiers lives devalued to a number and statistic

"No one cheered and nothing was discussed."

shield
conformity
polyptoton

"The strength of Collective Man"

september
conformity
capitalisation - sense of institution rather than individuality

"Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure;"

musee
ignorance of flaws in society situational irony
created with visual and auditory imagery of splash

"something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly along"

musee
ignorance of society's flaws
enjambment

ignor

free verse in musee

musee
ignorance of flaws
syntactically complex sentences
- stream of consiousness style
= unhurried and ustructured cadence =

" All the conventions conspire / To make this fort assume / The furniture of home;"
"lost in a hanted wood" where "children are afraid to sleep at night"

sept 1
ignorance
fort = metaphor of indivuduals building wall around themself making assumption that the war on the other side easy

ekphrastic form of musee - alludes to Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

cyclical nature of suffering
radicalise the sentiment of renaissance
art from renaissance to emphasise the cyclical nature of pain - the same them and the same now

enjambment and free verse in musee

musee
cyclical nature of suffering
= continuity of suffering and pain in our lives

"Exiled Thucydides knew / All that a speech can say / About democracy / And what dictators do"

sept 1
cyclical nature of suffering
intertextuality = repetitive cycle of human suffering since it is innate part of huma anture
human nature did not change - therefore such conflict will be repeated in every age

"She looked over his shoulder / For vines and olive trees"

shield
idealised perceptions of reality
pastoral imagery symbolising greek ideas of prosperity and harmony
to look for such things in a shield with images of war represents a very glorified perception of war

"an artifical wilderness / and a sky like lead"

shield
glorified perception of reality
barren and desolate imager

"no blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood, / Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down'

assumulative listing of everything that isnt there rather than listing what can be seen
juxtaposed with glorified of reality which thetis expected