CSEC ENGLISH
Hello there! Today we look at the poetic device of ALLUSION to help you prepare for the English B exam next June, and we have a range of exercises to hone your English A skills. Read on now, and enjoy!
POETIC DEVICES—Allusion
An allusion is a reference to a well-known saying or situation either in literature or in a speech made by someone famous. Many allusions in Western literature are to events or sayings in the Bible. We call these Biblical allusions. Other allusions may remind us of things we read in stories from our childhood or from famous works of literature.
When the device of allusion is used by a writer, it is as if the writer is drawing a comparison between what is happening now and what happened in the situation alluded to. Let’s look at examples of allusion in your CSEC poems.
The speaker in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror is a talking mirror. Where have we met a talking mirror before? Yes, in the story of Snow White. Remember how the mirror told the queen every day that she was the most beautiful person in the land? That is, until Snow White turned up, and then the mirror had a different story for the queen! The queen was devastated to know she was no longer the most beautiful. Why does Plath allude to that story? Because she wants to compare the woman in the poem to the queen. Like the queen in the fairy story, the woman in the poem has discovered that she is no longer young and beautiful, and she is terribly distressed by the signs of aging she sees in her face. Plath wants to make the point that women need to stop obsessing about physical beauty, and be concerned about their other qualities: their talents, their personality, their intelligence, and so on.
The father in Mervyn Morris’s Little Boy Crying imagines that his son sees him as a wicked ogre—just like the scary giant in Jack the Giant Killer. Alluding to that fairy tale, he says to the boy, ‘You hate him, you imagine/ chopping clean the tree he’s scrambling down…’ Why is the allusion effective? It lets us see that the speaker reads stories to his child and relates well to the boy’s thought processes and emotions. It gives us a sense of the fear and distress the child is feeling. But it also lets us know how sad the father is to know that his son sees him as such a monster for disciplining him; we realize that this father loves his son dearly.
We sense that the speaker in Lorna Goodison’s The Woman Speaks is a God-fearing woman because her speech is full of Biblical allusions. Her son has got into bad company, and she fears for his life. In her distress, she alludes to parents in the Bible whose sons similarly have ‘gone bad’: the mother of Judas Iscariot (who betrayed Jesus and met with a tragic end); the mother of the thief on the cross (a criminal crucified by the Romans alongside Jesus); and King David, whose son Absalom led a rebellion against his father, and died tragically in the attempt. No new mother looks at her baby son expecting him to become a criminal and die in tragic circumstances! By alluding to these Biblical mothers, the speaker draws on our pity for the mother in the poem. Another Biblical allusion in the same poem is to the teaching of Jesus—that even the worst of fathers will not give his son a stone if he asks for bread. The gang leader who has employed this woman’s son actually put ‘hot and exploding death’ in the boy’s hands when he simply asked for ‘bread’ (a job). This allusion dramatically exposes the heartless cruelty of drug dealers and the vulnerability of those they exploit.
What about effectiveness? Notice that all of these allusions caused the reader to COMPARE the present situation with the situation alluded to. In making the comparison, the reader UNDERSTOOD the situation better, and was MOVED EMOTIONALLY in response to the comparison being made.
PARAGRAPHING
Each paragraph you write should have a topic sentence plus a couple of sentences that expand on/explain that topic. Examine this paragraph. Notice the topic stated simply in the first sentence, and notice how each additional sentence develops that idea.
Corporal punishment is no solution for anti-social behaviour. The child who is beaten for wrong-doing merely becomes sly, and may bully other children. School-children who are beaten by teachers generally fail to learn well, and do badly in exams or else drop out of school. Criminals who are flogged by the authorities are not reformed by the floggings; they become hardened instead. To correct antisocial behavior society needs to re-direct—even re-educate the offender.
SYNONYMS
Find a synonym beginning with the letter O for each of the underlined words.
1. Many a man is looking for a wife who will be compliant—never challenging his authority.