Seamus Heaney - The Summer of Lost Rachel

I missed a lesson and I have only 15 days of school left to get this done. I need to annotate the poem (The Summer of Lost Rachel by Seamus Heaney) and I can't find notes anywhere. Can anyone help? Thank you

Reply 1

monzy24566

It is a solemn, poignant poem and ironically has no humour in it. Throughout the poem beautiful imagery is created to express loss of his 7 year old cousin. From the title of the poem we can see it is quite euphemistic.
Stanza One: he uses fricative of the potato crops flowering to convey a sense of growth and the enjambements perhaps symbolise a blurring of time and the last line is full of plosives 'and every barried briar' these plosives are quite harsh and reflect pain
Stanza 2: onomatopoeiac and the 'ring arounf the moon' is an ominous image foreshadowing the death of his cousin
Stanza Three: his grief and her whited face suggests her purity and innocence
Stanza Four and Five just describe her death and it shows how vivid his memories are with 'to run the film back' her memories still live
the reference to water throughout the poem is quite dominant and replicates tears
hope this helps its just an overview :smile: