Presentation of absence and distance in Atonement and 2 other poems

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  • Compare presentations of distance and absence in Atonement and 2 poems of your choice.
    • Atonement
      • Quotes
        • ''In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small-talk''
        • 'Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years - by post'
        • 'He now had a memory in the bank and would be drawing on it for months to come'
        • 'Incapable of stepping around the inanities'
        • 'He was putting distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him and given  him everything'
        • 'During his time inside, the only female visitor he was permitted was his mother. In case he was inflamed, they sai.d..'
        • 'He had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the largest thought. I love you, and you saved my life. He asked about her lodgings. She told him.
      • AO3 - Contextual links
        • Social class tensions - distance was created between Robbie and Cecilia due to their class division. Robbie himself has his 'scientific theories' about class, and, conscious of his own, he believes that the Tallises withdrew into their upper rank when he was accused of assault.
        • Modernism - A shift in the norm, where things were questioned and developed alludes to Robbie's change in heart from gardening and/or medicine to go into war.
    • 'Remember' by Christina Rossetti
      • Quotes
        • 'Gone far away into the silent land'
        • 'A vestige of the thoughts that once I had'
        • 'Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad'
        • 'And afterwards remember, do not grieve: / For if the darkness and corruption leave'
      • AO3 - Contextual links
        • Suffered from graves disease - attacked her physical beauty. Also suffer a nervous breakdown that was diagnosed at the time as 'religious mania' - religion was very important to her. This could perhaps allude to the deterioration of their relationship or simply just an allusion to her death.
        • Victorian era - had values of being earnest - very romantic, could link in with the ending couplet.
        • She turned to the past for inspiration - she used the work of Keats and Tennyson
    • 'The Ruined Maid' by Thomas Hardy
      • Quotes
        • 'Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!'-'
        • '-'Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak / But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek'
        • 'Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined,' said she.'
      • AO3 - Contextual links
        • His father was a stonemason and jobbing bulder - stimulated his book 'Tess of the D'Ubervilles where he wrote of sympathetic representations of working class figures and showed evidence of socially forward thinking, as the class divide was still brutally evident at this time, where not many were sympathetic. Represents distance as his way of thinking was evidently far fetched for the time.
        • Had an unhappy relationship with his wife Emma Gifford, perhaps why he's attempting to fantasize a 'ruined woman' when it'd usually be frowned upon. Presents the absence of love and affection in his life throughout his unhappy marriage.

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