Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 7.1
Unit 7 Language and context: register
Section 2 Language variation

This activity focuses on Edmund Blunden’s ’Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau, July 1917’ (1928). Vlamertinghe is a village in Belgium, near Passchen- daele, where some of the heaviest fighting of the First World War took place in 1917.

’And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’ -

But we are coming to the sacrifice.

Must those have flowers who are not yet gone West?

May those have flowers who live with death and lice?

This must be the floweriest place

That earth allows; the queenly face

Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace

Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies.

Bold great daisies, golden lights,

Bubbling roses’ pinks and whites -

Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million;

Such damask! such vermilion!

But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour

Is scarcely right; this red should have been much duller.

1 Read the poem carefully and then try to identify the poem’s register or registers by marking where you feel the register changes. To do this, you might ask the following questions of each phrase or line of the poem: does this sound like: (a) poetry or some non-poetic use of language? (b) written or spoken? (c) the language of 1917 or from an earlier period? (d) the kind of thing a soldier might say to another soldier in the First World War or something else (if so, what is that something else?).

2 What features of the language have influenced your answers to Question 1 - is it a matter of vocabulary and/or of syntax?

3 Try to identify the poem’s register or registers by writing a ’register label’ alongside the relevant words, phrases, lines or sections of the poem. For example, if you think that parts of the poem, or even the whole poem, is in ’poetic’ register, then write that label alongside the relevant lines.

4 Register variation is one of the best ways of spotting poetic allusion (see Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion); are there any lines or phrases in this poem that you think might be an allusion to another poem? Try out your hunches by doing an Internet search on these phrases (e.g. by using Google).

5 You should now have discovered that Blunden’s poem makes three allusions to one of the most famous poems in the English language. Do you think that the language of the rest of Blunden’s poem is: (a) trying to imitate the register of that poem, or (b) commenting on that register in some way, or (c) developing a different register?

6 Are there any other registers in the poem that come from the poem’s context rather than from the individual speaker? If so, identify the relevant words or phrases and try to decide what register they come from.

7 Which of the registers in the poem is the voice of the speaker? On the basis of your answer to this, how would you identify the poem’s speaker in terms of class, education or rank in the army?

Reading

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) ’Discourse in the Novel’, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.) (2001) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, London and New York: Norton.

Furniss, T.E. and Bath, M. (1996) Reading Poetry: An Introduction, London: Longman, pp. 3-24.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning, London: Arnold.

Leech, G. (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman, pp. 9-12, 49-51.

Simpson, Paul (1997) Language Through Literature: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

St John Butler, Lance (1999) Registering the Difference: Reading Literature Through Register, Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St Martin’s Press.