4.2 Understanding figurative language in poetry Learn how to: • recognise figurative techniques • recognise the effect of figurative techniques.
Why is being able to recognise and analyse figurative language important? You may be asked specific questions about a word or phrase which require you to tell how a particular word or phrase is used figuratively and the effect created. Poetry is often rich in figurative language. Read the following verses from the poem ‘Laventille’ by Derek Walcott. Laventille It huddled there steel tinkling its blue painted metal air, tempered in violence, like Rio’s favelas, with snaking, perilous streets whose edges fell as its Episcopal turkey-buzzards fall from its miraculous hilltop shrine, down the impossible drop to Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair that shine like peddlers’ tin trinkets in the sun. From a harsh shower, its gutters growled and gargled wash past the Youth Centre, past the water catchment, a rigid children’s carousel of cement; we climbed where lank electric lines and tension cables linked its raw brick hovels like a complex feud, where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed, five to a room, still clamped below their hatch, breeding like felonies Derek Walcott favelas: slums or shanty-towns Episcopal: relating to bishops Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair: other communities, near Laventille middle passage: the middle stage of the transatlantic slave trade; the sea journey undertaken by enslaved people from West Africa to the West Indies
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