Friday, 5 February 2016

'The Gun' by Vicki Feaver

4 comments:

  1. Whose is the narrative voice here? How does knowing that change the relationship between the speaker and the subject of the poem? What does that suggest about the theme?

    Notice also the use of enjambement at "trample/fur and feathers" - the juxtaposition of the violence of the movement with the delicacy of the down-trodden.

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  2. There is a stanza missing here:

    I join in the cooking: jointing
    and slicing, stirring and tasting –
    excited as if the King of Death
    had arrived to feast, stalking
    out of winter woods,
    his black mouth
    sprouting golden crocuses.

    The paradox contained in the single line stanza "A gun brings a house alive", life out of death, is continued in the final stanza. The woman has viewed the gun up until now with a kind of horrified fascination, as she sees it transform her husband (probably) from someone who shoots tin cans to someone who tramples on the animals he is killing and has a re-awakened sexual potency which excites her. He has become a sexual (the gun is a phallic symbol) as well as hunting predator. She now becomes complicit in this killing - sharing in the preparation of the food and cooking it, as if preparing a "feast" for the God that her husband, and by extension, she, now worship. This "black" king of death brings life - the golden crocuses are symbols of new life, appearing in spring and further image of revitalisation in the relationship.

    I think the contrast between the male and female is also present earlier in the "grey shadow/green-checked cloth". The "shadow" foreshadows the man's growing potency on the domestic, female sphere.

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