The Farmer’s Bride - Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 17.1.7
Key Quotations in The Prelude
Here are some key quotations you may want to use in your exam:
“One summer evening (led by her)”
- Personification of nature.
- Nature is powerful, but also benevolent and gentle at this point.
“Troubled pleasure”
- Contrasting words.
- These contrasting words create a sense of foreboding.
“Small circles glittering idly in the moon”
- Imagery.
- The poet creates positive images of beauty at the start of the poem, presenting nature as awe-inspiring and magical.
“A huge peak, black and huge”
- Personification of nature.
- Nature is personified and characterised as something menacing and frightening.
- “Black” is associated with ideas of power and death.
- Breaks iambic pentameter.
- Shows how overwhelming the experience was and how nature’s power cannot be tamed.
“There hung a darkness”
- Dark colour imagery.
- This highlights the haunting effect of the experience on the speaker.
- The verb “hung” indicates that the narrator was unable to get rid of these disturbing thoughts and feelings.
“I struck and struck again”
- Repetition and violent language.
- The repetition of “I struck and struck again” highlights the speaker’s panic and fear.
- Violent language is introduced into the poem for the first time, signifying man’s battle with nature.
“….And were a trouble to my dreams”
- Vague language.
- The language used by the narrator to describe the effect of the experience is vague. This highlights how the narrator is confused and unsettled by the experience.