Pavlova by Lorna Crozier

Pavlova by Lorna Crozier

Pavlova is a poem written by Lorna Crozier. The poetess has radical imaginations and the fine tuned emotional intellect which reveals the clarity of her poetry. Her style reveals the lyrical, witty, ironic, and contemplative moments of her characters.

ANSWER # 1

Imagery in the Poem

Poets have always been using imagery in their poems in order to spark off the senses of readers. Although, “image” is a synonym of picture, images in the poem do not need to visual, rather they have to be any of the five senses i.e. sight, touch, hear, smell, and taste, so that readers can respond to what poet is trying to deliver (Llorens, n.d.). Pavlova by Lorna Crozier is also a poem which is filled with imagery (Daurio, 2000). Some of the images used in the poem are subtle, but some are quite vivid. Pavlova is a ballerina, who is directly addressed in the poem and the metaphor used for her is Swan. She dances like swan that is beautiful “with the beautiful feet and arms”. Despite being graceful all her life and at the time of he death, Pavlova longs for a normal life with her family and have children. This is shown in the second stanza where like swan she is waiting while moistening her lips and making rounds like hundreds time before. One can sense the grace along with the helplessness of this ballerina.

The most vivid image is that of swan represented in fourth stanza where her inner self is symbolized with a black swan who ate her flesh with his beak and considers itself to be completing in heaven. Here, poetess does not mean a real black swan is biting her flesh, but it is the inner self of ballerina who dances like swan. She has led all her life being a swan while ignoring all the other aspects of life. In this process, she lest many things behind her and now feeling incomplete. The ballerina inside her has eaten all the womanhood and now she only expects to be whole after her death.

ANSWER # 2

Apostrophe Technique in the Poem

Apostrophe is a figure of speech in poetry that poets use to address an absent person or any abstract idea. Poets may apostrophize God, the Muse, a beloved, time, love, or any thing that actually cannot respond in reality. It thus appears that the apostrophe on the one hand supports illocutions directors in a turn to speak, on the other hand, the start and end tag exchange (Culler, 1977). Apostrophe is the technique which takes performer, audience, and the poet in the same loop and creates the sense of here-and-now. In Pavlova, the poetess has also used this technique to create a sense of bonding between all three aspects of poetry. Third-person narration is used when poets want to make the narrator detached from what ever is going on. On the other hand, apostrophe allows readers to go inside the head of the ...