Stylistic analysis
“No coffin, no grave” by Jared Angira
I)
SUMMARY
1)
Overview of the poem
2)
Structure of the poem
II)
LITERARY ANALYSIS IN “No coffin, No grave”
1)
Literary styles
2)
Linguistics styles
III)
DEFAMILIARISATION: Foregrounding by deviation and
parallelism
1)
Linguistic deviation
2)
Linguistic parallelism
CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
Stylistics has been defined as a subdisciplin of
linguistics that is concerned with the systematic analysis of the style in the
language. Style can be analysed by means of looking systematically at the
formal features of a text and determining their functional significance for the
interpretation of the text in question. Our work will consist on conducting a
stylistic analysis on the text “No coffin, No
grave,, of Jared Angira a Kenyan poet born in 1947. To better
analyse our poem, firstly we will have to bring out a summary of the poem by
using its structure and its overview, then we will move to a literary
explanation in order to study the literary stylistic and linguistic stylistic
of our text and to complete the work, explain the foregrounding point of view
through deviation and parallelism.
1)
I)
Summary
1)
OVERVIEW OF THE POEM
This poem is all about a paradox of a wealthy man (politician)
who had wanted a befitting burial but was not even buried but thrown into the
sea because burying him in the could infect the land. The poem opens with the author
telling the audience and suspending them with the fact that the person being buried
is unknown. This person who is buried without coffin no grave is so unlucky
that only, useless people are the ones to do his post-mortem in front of a
mortuary not in a hospital. The man is given a state burial with stuttering
rifles. The poet sarcastically compared his murder shut to a gunshot
representing a last respect of warrior. Instead of the poem being a pure elegy
which was beatified with irony and euphemism to show his dislike towards the
wicked and selfish life led by the tyrants leader; it was so unfortunate for
the dead politician who wished to have a respected burial rite but ended with a
belittled massacre. This poem is written to castigate the politicians about
their evil deeds, showing them how their end would look like if they don’t
change.
2)
STRUCTURE OF THE POEM
The structure of the poem is base on free verses, the
tone is sarcastic and satirical and the mood is made of sorrow and hope. The
poem is written in stanza and has a simple structure of verses. Therefore it
contains six stanza, each stanza has verses that are formed with the almost
absence of rhyme; and each rhyme is made up of feet referring to the quality of
stressed and unstressed syllables. For instance, the first stanza of our poem
is made up of six verses and the first verse contains nine feet or syllables,
the second verse of four feet, the third verse of ten feet, the fourth verse of
seven feet, the fifth of six feet, and the sixth of six feet. Thus the whole
poem is characterized by the irregular verses of irregular feet. So can we
imagine that this inconstancy of the structure of poem translates the mood of
poet?
II)
LITTERARY ANALYSIS
We are going to talk in this part about literary styles and linguistic styles.
1)
LITERARY STYLES
Here we will focus on linguistic techniques to interpret
the text. To have a better analysis of this poem, we are going to bring out the
interpretation of each stanza of the poem in question:
a-
Stanza 1: the poem opens with “He” (personal pronoun) making reference
to the traitor ruler himself. We then have the preposition “without”, which occurs tree times making
emphasis on satirical style of the author. The author tries here to describe
how the traitor ruler’s, burial his remains was made where took place using
words like “night club”, “scavengers”, to
give a sense that his death may have been wished and when it came, it was
necessary party for his people.
b-
Stanza 2: using the group of words
“stuttering rifles”, the author
states the ironical circumstances surrounding the death of the traitor ruler
and also his burial.
c-
Stanza 3: here to the author the
fact he died for the Kenyan country is a good and valuable reason for dying ;
for this words like “red”, “black”, “white”, are used because they
represent the colours of Kenyan flag. Another interpretation is that the author
uses the words “diary”, “sea”, “rain”
to show through the burial of the traitor ruler refers to futilities of life
meaning everything is vanity.
d-
Stanza 4: the author shows us here
the plagues of the Kenyan society: corruption using the words “politics”, and “expert”; prostitution with the occurrence
of “money speaks Madame” twice; famine using verbs
like “brood” twice also, ”grumble”; and poverty linked to words like
“hunger”, “torn mosquito net”, “stinking
darkness” the reason why the common man has left politics to the
expert to concentrate on these plagues. Because of all these, they ask their
ancestors to judge these politicians. The other way to interpretate this stanza
is by saying that the author here bring out the consequences of the traitor
ruler’s actions on the Kenyan society.
e-
Stanza 5: one more time, we have
to do with the use of the personal pronoun “he”
referring again to the traitor ruler and we also see the use of “his” (possessive pronoun) occurring three
times. Here the author states how traitor ruler wanted his burial to be, he
wished to be buried as a prince as we can see how the author does the
description: “he wished to be buried in a
golden-laden coffin, like a vip, under the jaracanda tree beside his palace, a
shelter for his grave, and much beer for the funeral party”. This
man hoped his burial would be a party and a feast.
f-
Stanza 6: with the use of the word
“tractors” and the verb “plough”
the author shows that the land should be laboured in order to take away all the
evils brought to the society by the politician. Otherwise, he tries to show a
way of forgetting about the traitor ruler without a trace of remembrance.
Through this literary analysis, we
will be able to elaborate a linguistic analysis of the poem.
2)
LINGUISTIC STYLES
The use of a stylistic analysis in order to text or
refine a linguistic theory will be needed here. There we will focus on the
poetic devices sarcasm in this case, the writer or the poet uses irony to
oppose, attack and speak ill of a concept; this is seen in line one: “He was buried without a coffin/without a grave ”. we can also use figures
of speech such as:
a-
Personification:”the gun salute of the day”,
“the car knelt”, “the red plate wept”. The gun, car, and the red
plate are inamimate objects or abstract ideas as living beings as in the verses
above. The author uses this linguistic style to show the pathetic fallacy of the
traitor ruler’s death. Here he brings out the fact that instead of the people
to mourn his death only objects such as the “gun”,
“the car”, “the red plate” are
the ones mourning his death. This is show real sarcasm according to the fact
that the poem is indeed a sarcastic poem.
b-
Metaphor is the use of a word or phrase denoting one kind of idea or object
in place of another word or phrase for the purpose of suggesting a likeness
between the two. In our poem we have statement such as “woman magnet”, “his diary”, submarine of the third world war”, this in comparison
to how the attitude of the traitor ruler influenced the society negatively ,
how it brought a lot of disorder seeing women letting themselves magnate by
money and doing sally things just to have it.
c-
Hyperbole is a form of inordinate exaggeration according to which a person or
thing is depicted as being better or worse than it is actually the case. Going
through the poem we can see the expression “stinking
darkness” showing here how life was really miserable during the
reign of the traitor ruler. This is clearly seen in stanza four where the
author uses a pathetic style in a form of exaggeration on the cruel behaviour
of wicked politicians, whose only gold is their wealth not caring about the
welfare of the society.
d-
Rhetorical
question refers to asking of questions not to gain information
but to assert more emphatically the obvious answer to what is asked. We can
notice this in line fourteen of our poem “isn’t
our flag red, black, and white?”. This just to let us understand
that when all servant service kicks the bucket, there use to wrappe his body
with the flag of the land but it was not the case with the traitor ruler of our
poem because only the colours of his garments already refer to that the day of
his death, so he was not more needed it.
e-
Ambiguity: the poet deliberately uses some words in context where their
contextual meaning becomes unclear. In our poem we have the word “diary” which is understood in two
different meanings not being sure of weather the poet is referring to the
traitor ruler’s intimate diary or if it is a reflection on how the traitor
ruler led his life, or a reflection of his actions on the Kenyan society.
f-
simile:
it is a specific comparison by means of the word “like” between two kind of ideas or object.
We can identify it our poem through the phrase “he wished to be buried in
a gold-laden coffin like a VIP”. The author here tries to show how
the traitor ruler had wanted his burial to be but was instead given the
opposite of what he had actually wanted.
III) DEFAMILIARISATION: FOREGROUNDING BY DEVIATION AND PARALLELISM
Foregrounding refers to features in a text that in
some sense “stand out” from their surrounding, it subjects that in any text,
some sounds, words, phrases, and clauses may be so different from what
surrounds them. This process is archived by linguistics deviation or
linguistics parallelism.
1)
LINGUISTICS DEVIATION
It is the occurrence of the unexpected irregularity in
a language. In the poem “No coffin, No grave”, we can notice many forms of
deviation. The first case of deviation we can see in our text is the irregular
poetic representation of the stanza of our poem; for example stanza one, it
contains six verses, stanza two: five verses, stanza three: four verses, stanza
four: fourteen verses, stanza five: seven verses, stanza six: two verses; we
can say that this disorganised representation of our poem can be interprated as
a form of disorganisation of the Kenyan society. We can also notice this
deviation in stanza one, where the poet uses the word “scavengers” and further continues with “post-mortem” and then the word “night club”. This is a semantic deviation
because these words are not used in their right context because when we talk of
“post-mortem”, words that should
really be attached to it should be words like “doctor”,
“mortuary” which connotate death,
but the poet instead deviated by using the words mentioned above. We can say
that by using those words, the poet wants to show how great was the hatred
towards the death man in question. Here we can therefore talk of external
deviation. We will also go down to stanza five to bring out another form of
deviation, this will be the statement “VIP”
written in capital letters showing the irregularity in the poem; the poet here
devites the rules of written when he inserts capital letters in the text; this
is to show the importance of the word according to the fact that the death
person had wanted an enormous burial like that of a king. We shall then talk of
internal deviation. We can still see in the same stanza through the expression
“Third World War" that it is
also noticed the use of capital letters but this time around at the beginning
of the referred words, this is also to show the importance of the expression in
the poem. This form of deviation is also seen in the title of our poem “No
coffin, No grave”.
2)
LINGUISTICS PARALLELISM
It is the occurrence of unexpected regularity in
language. There are many forms of parallelism in our poem. First, we have
phonological parallelism with the occurrence of the sound ‘up’ in
the words “clup” and “up” as a form of rhyme at the end of
stanza one and at the beginning of stanza two. We also have the sound ‘ei’ in the words ‘day’ and ‘anyway’ still as a form of the rhyme in stanza two. We then
have the occurrence of the sound ‘am’
in the word “madam” which occurs
twice in stanza four. This phonological parallelism brings out a sort of
musical effect to the poem. To continue, we have the constant occurrence of
definite article “The” seen at
the beginning of two last verses of stanza two and the two first verses of
stanza three; we also have the preposition “without”
which occurs twice at the beginning of the poem, we then have the conjunction “and” which occurs many time at the
beginning of verses three, five, eight and thirteen of stanza four to show a
form of insistence on the negative description of the Kenyan society. This form
of parallelism is referred to as syntaxes parallelism. Then we can notice the
use of semantic parallelism which is seen most especially in the stanza four
with the use of negative values action such as “brood on hunger”, “sleep under the torn mosquito net”, stinking darkness”
that give the sense of suffering due to the bad governance of the traitor
ruler.
CONCLUSION
Being at the end of our work which was based on the stylistic
analysis of the poem “No coffin, No grave “ by Jared Angira, we can
say that with the analysis of the literary analysis where our analysis was
concerned with the linguistics stylistic and literary stylistics with the use
of various figures of speech, and with the analysis of the concept of
defamiliarisation where the analysis was based on foregrounding of linguistic
deviation with the use of external and internal deviation, also based on
linguistic parallelism with the use of phonological, syntax and
semanticparallelism, we brought out the analysis of the style by Jared Angira
is sacarsm.