hello and welcome to another video getting you grades seven eight and nine for your poetry comparisons today as you know we're focusing on camicazi and as usual there will be just five quotations here they are highlighted in yellow for you so you can get a taste of what is to come and that's it that's all you need to get the grade as usual I'll show you how to organize your comparison using the phosphating the language features the structure and the ending straight in to see if we can make this video super short now who's talking to who in this poem is super confusing so this is my best way of explaining it it's about a daughter talking about her father who is the kamikaze pilot and she's telling her own children but she doesn't start telling her own children till after this line so this is some information from the poet it's back story the poem begins her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water a samurai sword now the way I've read that is to emphasize the sibilants this repeated S sound gives it a sign of peace and that peaceful sound reflects the peace that he's supposed to find in death that's also symbolized with sunrise sun symbolizing both the country of Japan that's why the Sun is the symbol on their flag and it also symbolizes divinity it's like meeting God water is always a symbol of purity and so he's purifying himself spiritually this way and also for Christian audience for us it also signifies baptism he's dying in order to enter into new life as a hero then we have this wonderful word embarked it literally means to get on a boat a barque is a boat and that's being used deliberately here because it's going to be the site of the grandfather's boat so the father's father's boat that reminds him what it's like to be a see what it's like to be a fisherman and persuades him not to kill other sailors on the sea so ultimately the father is going to realize the enemy is just like him and also his father's boat will remind him of the family that he's losing and therefore he chooses not to die so these are this first stanza are the facts of his journey or the beginning of his journey and now this line break here shows us the thoughts of the daughter as she reimagines what was going through her father's head so even though her father when she was a child became dead to her she still formed this amazing intellectual bond with him where she's trying to imagine his thoughts and experiences so she imagines him looking down on schools of fish the fish themselves are obviously symbols of life and this is the life he doesn't want to give up by committing suicide now the simile she uses is revealing the fish are like a huge flag waved first one way and then the other in a figure of 8 so the flag of course represents patriotism so on the one hand these fish represent life but on the other they represent the sacrifice that he's supposed to make patriotically for his country for the flag many readers have picked up on this idea of the figure of 8 on its side I'll just trace it with my mouse here and this is the symbol for infinity so at this moment he's imagining his death and presumably living forever immortal II as a hero but at the same time infinity is eternal death and so he's also imagining the absence of life forever we can also say that the figure of eight returns on itself so what we have here is a physical representation of how he's going to fly out to commit suicide change his mind then come back and that's also reflected in the language he flies first one way and then the other in returning so this is the moment where he begins to change his mind according to his daughter this stanza describes everything that would be on the father's boat and so the daughter is thinking yes that was my grandfather's boat but she's saying that to her children that this is like a reply the children have interrupted when they're talking about the boat and she's saying yes that's grandfather's boat which would be her children's grandfather which would be her father so that line suggests that the daughter has then established a relationship with her father who becomes the children's grandfather who they still talk to so he's obviously inherited the boat and his relationship with the family has completely changed now I've studied this poem many times and nobody ever points this out the conventional interpretation of this poem is that the father lives a kind of living death because his family refused to talk to him as we shall see however it seems that this daughter has changed that for her own children she has allowed them to have a grandfather her father so let's focus on what he sees on the boat according to his daughter the white bait our kind of fish and they are silver in color but the choice of language describing them as a loose silver is an allusion to a biblical description so in the West silver has always represented the idea of betrayal because Judas Iscariot one of the twelve disciples betrayed Jesus to the Romans in return for thirty pieces of silver and that's referenced if you like in loose the idea of loose morality as well as in loose coins so she invites us to imagine these lis coins at the same time as she describes the color and movement of the fish being released onto the boats deck so the white bait symbolize his betrayal of his country just as Judas betrayed Jesus now the Dark Prince muscular and dangerous that is the tuna fish is another symbol and it's more difficult to work out what that signifies it could signify the Japanese royal family who are effectively condemning these men to go to their deaths to sacrifice themselves for their country and for their Emperor but equally it could symbolize the subversive act that her father does he by not killing himself and so his act his protest against throwing his what life away pointlessly is it turns out to be a dark and princely act it's a positive way of looking at what he's done he's punished by society because what he's done is dangerous but it's not a weak decision it's a muscular one it's a strong one now that interpretation only works if we think that the narrator the daughter has now welcomed her father back into the family to be a grandfather to her own children if you don't take that point of view then this has to represent the Japanese royal family who are dangerous to the samurai because they caused their deaths now I do favor the idea that she has brought her father back into the family and it's because of these two quotations so only we children still chatted and laughed so that means that they love their father they were grateful to have him back and that is the natural human reaction darlin then introduces a line break for a new stanza till we get this Volta this turn till gradually we two learnt to be silent the word gradually I think shows us how unnatural it was for the children to disown their father they couldn't do it suddenly and so this implies that the Japanese culture at the time he's doing something painful and wrong and it takes a long time for the children to adjust to it and the fact that they learned it also suggests it was totally unnatural this invites us to imagine that as this child the daughter grows up she's now reflecting back on her childhood and thinking that decision was wrong and sometimes she said she met he must have wondered which had been the better way to die so the phrase he must have wondered means the daughter has never spoken to her father about his decision even though he's lived many years afterwards because the memory is too painful for him the last line which had been the better way to die suggests that he's died emotionally within the family which is problematic it suggests that he's never been accepted back their family have permanently ostracized him but as we've seen when she says to her children yes that was grandfathers boat that can't work because her children's grandfather is her father therefore the last line doesn't mean he is faced an ultimate death excluded by his family that death only lasted while his own wife was alive perhaps the other children have still not accepted him but this daughter has because she's retelling the story to her own children now think Beatriz garland makes this chronology about who's talking to who through the generations really complicated to try and show how complex culture can be and how damaging it can be to the family through the generations but it's also a message of hope you know how do countries and people recover from a war well it's the next generation the ones who weren't alive during the war who rebuild that country and who changed the culture and have different points of view and that's quite a profound question if you take the case of Japan it was the only country bombed with atomic bombs and is actually bombed twice Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and yet by the 1970s Japan had become an economic superpower and so just as Japan did not die after this amazing level of destruction so the father that the children's grandfather also did not actually die so my reading when we get to the ending is that this is actually a poem about hope about how cultures can change and they don't have to be locked into the old way of doing things we could even argue that losing the war has enabled this culture to change and become something much better than it was so this would be my only positive poem about war in the anthology you know because the culture has become much more celebratory of life rather than being willing to sacrifice it through the tradition of the samurai right let's return to the phosphate and see how we've approached it well obviously we've got the poet's point of view at the beginning which I've covered and at the end which I've covered everything I've mentioned about the chronology about who's speaking about who that's structure every time I've looked at those two line breaks between stanzas that's you analyzing structure as well the language features we've done all the way through using the words symbol and simile which we had here and next for the grade seven we need to consider the analysis of form so that's quite difficult to write about in this poem we'll see that each stanza is six lines long but I can't think of an actual reason for this it doesn't relates to the subject matter of the poem in any way it's written in free verse entirely without rhyme and I guess the easiest thing we can say about that is it feels like natural speech it's as though this becomes a monologue from he must have looked far down as she speaks to her children perhaps we can say this makes it feel more like a narrative a story that she's telling with a moral at the end of it which is that we shouldn't kill our members of our own family instead we should do the opposite and give them life and protection all I suppose we could argue that the poem doesn't really have a form which reflects the way the family did not give the father his true form as a father they denied him that identity and then we could say that the poem is attempting to develop a perform with these regular six line stanzas which could reflect how she's trying to give a new identity a new form to her father by establishing him as the grandfather to her own children so you know I struggle with this sometimes because 20th century poets and 21st century poets often deliberately ignore form because they're trying to do something new and so what I've given you is strictly for the exam so remember your tactic in the exam is to write about the form first because that anchors the examiners expectation that you're a grade 7 student or above because that's where form enters the math scheme and with your second poem you'll also follow this same pattern it's a really easy way to talk about the author's purpose because it's always revealed at the opening and then it always changes by the ending as we saw particularly in this poem where we get the daughters new perspective on her father where she reintroduces him to her own children and he becomes a grandfather it's very likely that you haven't followed this native about who is talking to who in the same way in your own lessons teachers find it really difficult to work out who it is that's talking to who about oh and I've had that same difficulty but I've given it probably an hour of thinking and the search that's the best I can do so I hope that makes sense for you if you would like more as usual don't forget to give me the comments underneath and don't forget to subscribe see you soon on my channel