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Analysis of This Is The Dark Time

This poem describes the poet's experience as a child being kept away from rough neighborhood children by his parents. The children are described as having muscles "like iron" and jerking hands, implying their physical strength and roughness. They mocked the poet's speech impediment and copied his lisp. Though the poet feared them, he also seemed to admire their freedom and envy their normal childhood, longing to forgive them but never receiving a smile in return. The poem explores themes of childhood, parenting, social class differences and experiences.

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Shafi Saheed
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171 views5 pages

Analysis of This Is The Dark Time

This poem describes the poet's experience as a child being kept away from rough neighborhood children by his parents. The children are described as having muscles "like iron" and jerking hands, implying their physical strength and roughness. They mocked the poet's speech impediment and copied his lisp. Though the poet feared them, he also seemed to admire their freedom and envy their normal childhood, longing to forgive them but never receiving a smile in return. The poem explores themes of childhood, parenting, social class differences and experiences.

Uploaded by

Shafi Saheed
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Analysis of This is the Dark Time, My Love- Martin Carter

Martin carter-
- 1 of the advocates for independence in Guyana.
- Wrote poem from a jail cell
‘This is the dark time, my love’
- He was talking to his ‘love’ so he was referring to her as ‘my love’
‘All round the land brown beetles crawl about’
- Brown beetles are a description for the soldiers that are everywhere. The poet compared
the soldiers metaphorically to beetles. Tells us how deeply he felt about the soldiers and
how much he hated them ‘brown beetles crawl about’
‘The shining sun is hidden in the sky’
- Shining sun in the poem it’s the dream that they are talking about. The sun is now hidden,
they cannot see the hope of now becoming independent. They cannot see themselves as
being their own nation, having their own motto neither having a flag.
‘Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow’
- Personification
Repeating first line In stanza 1
- Example of repetition
- Shows us how serious the situation is
‘It is the season of oppression, dark metal and tears’
- season of oppression- period of pain, guns, crying, darkness
- showing us how serious the situation is by using ‘season of oppression’
‘the festival of guns, the carnival misery’
- oxymoron
‘everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious’
- Places were filled with beetles(soldiers) that were not welcomed
- poet felt unsure and nervous because he had no idea what the future held for him
‘who comes walking in the dark night time?’ – rhetorical question
- tells us that the character/poet was unsure at the point in time about what was going on

‘whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass’


Metaphorically
- ‘slender grass’- growth, success, thriving.
Steel boot is damaging the ‘slender grass’ which are the hopes and dreams of becoming a free
and independent nation in the poem.
‘it is the man of death, my love, the strange invader’
- Talking to his wife ‘my love’ and explaining to her everything that is going on.
- ‘strange invader’- stranger(not really sure where the person came out from)
‘watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.’
- Shows us how deeply the poet(Martin Carter) felt about everything that was going on.
- Trying to tell us that the country or land was laying there peacefully sleeping and
suddenly this person came and aimed a gun at their dreams of becoming an independent
nation.
- The poet is trying to tell us that the country is about to be destroyed by someone strange,
not known and taking advantage of the fact that the Guyanese people at the time were not
able to do much for themselves supposedly.
Literary devices
Personification
‘Red flowers bend their heads…’
(giving the quality of a human to a none human)
Also giving us an idea about how deep the situation was at Guyana that even nature felt what
was going on.
Oxymoron
‘…festival of guns…the carnival of misery’
Telling us that it wasn’t a time of fun or anything of the sort, it was a time of hardship, sadness
and pain.
‘festivals of guns’- oxymoron- comparing fun festivals(Diwali, Phagwa, Christmas) to
sadness(guns)
‘the carnival misery’- oxymoron- carnival(happy time) of misery(sad time)
Themes
 War
 Love
 Desire
 Hope
 Dreams
My parents- Stephen Spender
My parents kept me from children who were rough Imagery: shows how rough the
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes children were.
Their thighs shone through rags. They ran in the street
Gives the idea of how different they
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.
were to the persona

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron (talking about how rough the boys were and
he is saying that he feared their muscles more than he would fear tigers.)
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms (the boys are bullying the poet in the
sense that they are rough with him, probably beating him. still some amount of admiration
even though he is being bullied so it gives us the idea that the boy is not listening to his
parents to keep away from the individuals.)
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys (the boys are laughing at his speech
problem/impediment)
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges (‘they were lithe’- this tells us that the
children were flexible and freely movable)
Like dogs to bark at my world.(onomatopoeia) They threw mud (it gives us the idea that the
poor, lithe boys were chastising the world of the poet)
While I looked the other way(he didn’t mind much), pretending to smile (he didn’t smile but
he pretended too, in other words not a real smile.)
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled. (somewhat admires the children even to the
point of envying the NORMAL life they have and are living. He would have forgiven them
Simile- shows how rough
but they never returned a warm gesture, they were never friends.)
the children were

The simile shows us how rough the children were compared to the well dressed, soft spoken boy.
It also gives us the idea that the boys acted like animals when compared to this normal or higher
class poet/persona.
Themes
 Children
 Parents
 Childhood experiences
 Social stratification- in the sense that people who are off different class because of their
wealth are separated. For eg the poet in the poem happens to be someone well dressed,
soft spoken against someone with harsh words and torn clothes. The poet is of a higher
class and then there are these poor life boys acting like animals.

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