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The Wholly Innocent

Conflicts Mass I

Genocide Self defence

Innocent lamb Godlike

Innocence Implied guilt

Choice Fate

Early Late

Nameless Named

Air Womb

I You

See Unseen

Touch of care Bucket thrust

Rejoice Cry

God Man

Absence presence

Single Many

Central Peripheral

Trust Betrayal

Down Up

Powerless Powerful

• Introduces

• Progresses

• Introduces You

• Links

• Broadens the criticism

• Personal address

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Speaker • A foetus/ a dead unborn child

• Powerless, accusatory, sad, angry, disdainful.

• He/she bemoans the loss, recounts his/her death, rebukes those who make the decisions, laments a world where such things are allowed to happen.

• A perceived lack of humanity in attitudes to the expendability of all life and concern over humanity’s primacy over God: we overstep our mark

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Speaker Personal pronoun – conflict of I and you – sets up a first-person second person antipathy – accusatory

The loss is expressed in the negative form

and the extent – /nor/prefix ‘un’ The anger in verbs of extent –

never/total/all The sense of disdain at the disregard –

and many and many shambles Lamentation – remember me Anger – bucket thrust life line trust – the

betrayal and discounting of the individual life and connection

Characters

God lamb- Christian allusion Jews - doomed race – the chosen people (future generations)

Where - No clear sense – ironic living room makes it feel domestic

When – universal day and night “sun or star”

Where and When

Dramatic monologue

Mirrors the simplified song like quality of some of the metaphysical and the romantics such as Blake (songlike will do if you have no point of context)

Lack of punctuation differs from the typical song form.

Form

Sovereign touch / central cry = transferred epithet

Abstract similes - anonymous as mud / Absolute as blood (obscure)

Biblical similes - God-like / defenceless as a lamb (almost clichéd – takes us back to the idea of the emblematic and Blake)

Mismatch between archaism of expression “For I” “Oh you” “so to decide” and subject matter of abortion

Mismatch between the speaker and his/her actual ability to speak - innocence and experience

Talk(s) – we would normally say this as singular – creates a formality or idea of presentation (politics)

Lack of punctuation results in words doubling their understanding as an object at the end of one sentence as the simultaneous subject at the beginning of the next

No use of humour - only the overall irony of “too late” for the individual speaker

Rhetoric: emotive rather than logical

Bucket thrust/cost of me/ unseen I came/ unseen I went /lies so to decide/shambles died – inverted word order (anastrophe)

Drops ‘the’ (definite article) and ‘a’ (indefinite article) sun/star

Syntax – word order

Sovereign – supreme ruler – supreme power – effective

Rejoice – happy but religious connotations

Voted and ZPG – political terms– sharp contrast to the figurative

shambles – understatement in comparison to the some of the description implies unplanned/unthinking

abroad – wide but foreign

walking in air – ethereal

central cry – core and of greatest importance

Vocabulary

Anaphora

I never

Nor

And many

Remember me

Unseen I

Patterns of rhetoric

Only one pair that does not rhyme - knew/eye the establishment of loss/absence

Trust/thrust – antithetical – connection and pushing away dealt with

Decide/genocide - responsibility enhanced

Womb/room – sense of enclosed safety – ironic

I am /lamb – Christ like analogy reinforced

Star/ far – the distance of the ‘victim’ – the halted elevation star in heaven – the notion of the unchristened babe

Patterns of rhyme

ABoLute/Blood – oozing sounds

nOW/dOWn – words fall away twice in the sound pattern – literal and sound come together

bUCket/ thrUst - amplifies the aggression of the action and paired words create an auxesis

Patterns of sound

Lacks any kind of punctuation - link to ambiguity/ doubling of meaning

Short lines:

Nor voted on my fate

As absolute as blood

Anonymous as mud

Lies to so decide

Talks turn to genocide

And call it living room

And many ZPG

Visual patterns

Quatrains - short line iambic tetrameter and trimeter – song like = innocence of the child

Patterns of rhythm

Poem title

The poem relies on a homophone: holy and wholly. Demonstrates Dawe’s interest in sound over the visual Supports the Christ-child analogy