Faith Healing

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  • Created by: daltog
  • Created on: 10-02-21 16:22
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  • Faith Healing
    • Imagery
      • "warm, spring rain of loving care" - metaphor, rain releases the fruitfulness of the soil that has been hardned by winters front
        • Similarly, the healers loving care releases the women's pent up feelings
      • Uses imagery and vocabulary of Christianity reference to worshippers as "children and sheep" - suggests that the women's need for religious blessing arises
      • "Tears" and "eyes squeezing grief"
      • "Thawing the rapid landscape weeps"
      • Of being a child - faith healers repeated word "now, dear child" are emphasised  by italics
      • His silver hair and blessing make the healer himself see like God - exonerates his fatherly role (could be a reference to himself, seeing himself as God - omnibenevolent)
      • Encounter each other women has with the healer is very brief - "What's wrong" then asks God to cure the troubled part "this eye that knee"
    • Language
      • Important image of rain and tears
      • A former describing a materialistic people from whom Larkin is distance, whilst the latter is meant sarcastically with a hint of relief
      • Uses a plethora of relgious vocabulary including :- children, sheep for worshippers, exile, loving care, joy and re-awaken
    • Notes
      • It isn't God that makes these people have this healing process isn't that God that makes them be happy
      • Larkin recognises that within us all there is a child 'lamb of God' that has been cheated for the love that it might've and couldnt recieve the healing fills this void
      • Snapshots for these people deprived of love, of the love that they deserve thus releasing this cheated child within them
      • Though the process may not be a healing from God, the women are having a healing process
      • Image of care and comfort juxtaposes the previous image at which the the women this care could reflect that of an omnibenevolent God
    • Time and Voice
      • Written in the present tense
      • Larkin is a detached, third person observer of the experience
      • Gives authority to his general conclusions in the first stanza "in everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love"
    • Structure
      • Divide into three stanza's of ten lines with five lines stresses each and a regular but complex rhyming pattern: ABCABDABCABD
      • Lines are not end-stopped, but run on into each other - creates a sense of movement and progressesion
        • Links to Water
          • Disparagement of religion is reinforced
          • Religious language used by someone supposedly summoning the spirts / God to provide healing is undermined by his lack of care
          • The women - in alignment with water, are instilling this man with power because it gives them an outlet for their emotions and gives them opportunity to alleviate the pain they have
          • Larkin seems to suggest as concocting a religion from water
            • Are the women putting their faith in God of the healer (through the form of the healer) or just searching for the "healer" as in love to be fixed
          • Enjambment creates a sense of progression and continuity - like the healer's quick flow of appointments
      • Written in iambic pentameter
      • Emulates (the structure) regimented nature of the women lining up to meet the faith healer
      • Third person perspective makes the reader agree with his observations and gives his final conclusions authority - alternatively the 3rd person perspective  would be the faith healer, the women and God
    • Context
      • Belief that certain people have the ability to cure or heal through a connection to a higher poem
      • Poem is atypical of Larkin who is "an agnostic but an Anglican one"
      • About Billy Graham an evangelical pastor who in 1947 started a crusade of travelling across the world for faith healing
      • Attracted huge crowds particularly a large women audience
    • Paradox
      • If the patient is healed at any point after seeing the healer, it can be attributed to them; if the patient is not healed, then they can be blamed for not having enough faith - effectively a scam
    • Critics
      • "The wonderful influence of imagination in the cure of diseases is well known. A motion of the hand, or a glance of the eye, will throw a week and credulous patient into a fit; and a pill made of bread, if taken with sufficient faith, will operate a cure better than all the drug's in the pharmacopoeia" - Charles Mackay
      • 'Glum accuracy' - Andrew Motion
      • Larkin himself stated there was no such thing as 'true love' just 'deprivation and ignorance'
      • The poem stands out from many of his other poems as Larkin almost here shows the power of what love can do
      • Critic Swarbrick described love for Larkin as an 'ideal which condemns us to disappoint'
    • Quotes
      • "Steward tirelessly persuade them onwards to his voice and hands
      • "Some Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives just yet but some stay twitching and loud"
      • "Their hands are clasped abruptly; then; exiled"
      • "Re-awaken"
      • "The voice above Saying Dear Child and all time has been disproved"
    • Childhood
      • Reference to the hidden child within each would
      • Could be a reference to the term commonly used fir worshippers to Christianity
      • Could be a play on words
      • Perhaps its simply the act of trust rather than religion which heals us
      • Analytical view of the emotional event he witnesses
      • Nothing cures this ache but the healing experience relieves by loosening suppressed emotions

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