Questions for Discussion

1 How is the sound image of the night created in the extract? Why does Masefield include a full description of all the normal countryside sounds of the night in the first paragraph? What phonetic and lexical means help to create the vivid portrayal of the night in the countryside? What effect is achieved through underlining the fact that it was quiet and silent that night at the campsite?

2 How would you describe the atmosphere he is trying to convey here? At what point in the extract is there most tension? How does Masefield achieve this build-up of tense writing and expectation? What lexical, syntactical and lexico-syntactical stylistic devices are used to achieve this effect?

3. Why did the author choose the first-person-narration? What types of narration and speech can you find in the extract? Comment on their interaction.

Seminar 12

Unit II

Emotive space of the text

2.1.

NIGHT AND MORNING

Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. Anna and the young man went on noiselessly by the hedge, along where the farm-carts had made dark ruts in the grass. They came through a gate into a wide open field where still much light seemed to spread against their faces. In the under-shadow the sheaves lay on the ground where the reapers had left them, many sheaves like bodies prostrate in shadowy bulk; others were riding hazily in shocks, like ships in the haze of moonlight and of dusk, further off.

from ‘The Rainbow’ by D. H. Lawrence

Fall had a distinctive feeling about it. I woke one morning to find that the maples and beeches had taken on a touch of colour. There was a rime of frost whiskers around the edge of the horse trough and the pumpkins sat like blobs of orange paint among the withered vines.

Fall mornings were full of sound as well. A tractor backfired in the distance, a train groaned up a grade and somebody beat a spoon on a dishpan to call the men to breakfast. A truck rumbled along the road and stopped to pick up milk cans. The pigs grumbled while pullets foolhardy enough to roost in the orchard waited for warm mash to help restore circulation. Those were mornings of calves bawling, and marsh fog and a clammy feeling to the hook of the barnyard gate.

From ‘Mostly in Clover’ by Harry J. Boyle

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