Here's a complete breakdown of the poem 'Waterfall' by Lauris Dorothy Edmond from the CAIE / Cambridge IGCSE and O Level Poetry Anthology (Songs of Ourselves, Volume 2, Part 4).
Includes, but is not limited to:
VOCABULARY
STORY / SUMMARY
SPEAKER / VOICE
ATTITUDES
LANGUAGE FEATURES
STRU...
“I do not ask for youth, nor for delay
in the rising of time's irreversible river
that takes the jewelled arc of the waterfall….”
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright restrictions)
VOCABULARY
Delay - putting something off, something taking longer than it should
Irreversible - unable to be reversed
Arc - a curved shape
Glimpse - catch sight of
Glinting - shining, catching light
Bracken - fern plants that have died back and turned brown
Astringent - sharp, bitter
Shrewd - judging strictly, but not necessarily unfairly
Chastened - being restrained or softened, also punished or disciplined
Nostalgia - looking back at the past with longing and sadness
Jauntiness - happiness, positive energy
Sinewed - strengthened (sinews are the tissue that holds muscle together)
Resolution - determination
Luminous - bright, glowing
STORY/SUMMARY
The speaker doesn’t ask to return to youth, or to slow down the passage of time which
is like a river flowing, creating a waterfall which arcs as it falls, each droplet in flight is
like a minute which catches the light and she is able to see it clearly for brief a
moment, before it falls. In it she sees everything she has, and everything that she is
losing.
, She doesn’t dream for her and her partner to be young again, and they get to relive the
love they felt in youth - the memory of this is tied up with natural landscape, bracken
and moss, and still water that holds their reflection forever as it does not move.
It’s enough for the speaker to enter a room and find her partner looking back at her
with kindness, this is what they now call ‘love’, his eyes are ‘shrewd’, judgemental but
fair and trustful, his face has become more disciplined over the years of careful decision
making, they sit in mild conversation in the afternoons and talk without longing for the
past.
But when the partner leaves her, with his happiness made stronger by determination
rather than strength, suddenly she feels an intense, quick love for him. This is because
she remembers (as described in the poem’s opening) that bright, luminous moments of
joy pass quickly and you only get to experience them once before they drop into the
‘dark pool’ of memory and vanish forever.
SPEAKER/VOICE
The speaker uses the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ to show that she is talking
from a personal point of view, and direct address ‘you’ to demonstrate that the
poem is intended for a private audience - her partner. The ‘you’, however, comes in
the second stanza, so the effect is for the poem to shift in perspective from talking
generally about time and memory, to personally about the speaker’s partner and her
relationship with him.
LANGUAGE
● Extended metaphor - Throughout the poem, an extended metaphor is used to
depict time as an ‘irreversible river’ which flows onwards and cannot be
stopped. Moments and experiences are like droplets that suddenly come into
view, as if they are catching light as they flow down a waterfall. This creates a
beautiful and complex metaphor about the nature of time - finishing with the
visual image of the ‘dark pool’ which represents past experiences that have
been committed to memory.
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