Age ☆

Question 1

Summary of Age:

Answer 1

1. Reflecting on life experiences
2. Reflecting on what they will leave behind - legacy as approaching death.

Question 2

‘My age fallen away like white swaddling’

Answer 2

• Simile
• Approaches death lacking the safety and structure of life.
• Once innocent and pure - as age, less innocent as corrupted by complexity and difficult of life.

Question 3

‘Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.’

Answer 3

• Metaphor : Unable make sense of life experiences, abstract nature of memories are vast and elemental, but difficult to distinguish/relate to who he is now.

Question 4

‘I bend closer’

Answer 4

• Desperation to make sense of his life.

Question 5

‘A lighted tenement scuttling with voices’

Answer 5

• Metaphor
• Life is desperate and demanding, erodes element of our humanity.

Question 6

‘O you tall game I tired myself with joining!’

Answer 6

• Metaphor - Life is a vast and difficult competition that exhausts those who participate.

Question 7

‘I wade through you like knee-level weeds’

Answer 7

• Simile
• As age, life itself becomes difficult and less enjoyable (wade)
• Face unavoidable and unwanted hardship.

Question 8

‘dear translucent bergs: Silence and space’

Answer 8

• Perspective now defined by the silence and isolation, but gains no greater perspective from the quiet. Welcomes the quiet (dear).
• Vast and largely concealed - achieves little clarity on the life he lived.

Question 9

What is the second stanza of Age about?

Answer 9

• Speaker considers what he’s left with, and the legacy in how he’ll be remembered.

Question 10

‘By now so much has flown From the nest here of my head that I needs must turn To know what prints I leave’

Answer 10

• Natural imagery
• As age, become redundant and unneeded, like a nest.

Question 11

‘whether of feet, Or spoor of pads, or a bird’s adept splay’

Answer 11

• Listing
• All destined to leave a legacy that will exist in 1 of 3 forms:
  ‘feet’ of Hunter - defined by constant and relentless pursuits.
  ‘spoor’ - evading a life of restriction and entrapment.
  ‘adept splay’ - ideal, freedom, above the superficial lives of ones like Hunter.

Question 12

In the final lines of Age, what does the speaker conclude?

Answer 12

• Speaker does not suggest which legacy he will leave behind, implies that those after us will form judgements about the lives we lived, not ourselves.