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Dive into the powerful themes and emotive word choices in Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Shooting Stars," exploring the devastating impact of the Holocaust through a poignant first-person narrative.
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Shooting Stars Carol Ann Duffy
Initial questions • What are the connotations of the title? Is this an effective title based on the actual poem? Explain fully. • What is the poem about? What incidents are mentioned? • How is the poem structured? Does this add anything to the poem? • Who is the persona or narrator of the poem? Why are they important? Why has Carol Ann Duffy chosen this person to be the narrator? • What other characters are in the poem? What is their significance? • Religion, Persecution, History, Humanity and Feminity are all themes that run through this poem. With close reference to the text show how the reader is made aware of these themes. • The word choice is particularly emotive in this poem. Pick three examples of emotive word choice and explain their effect in detail. • Comment in detail about any feature of sentence structure that you find particularly interesting. • Find two examples of imagery and explain how they helped your understanding of the central concerns of the poem. • What reactions/emotions are expected from the reader?
Summary Using the first person singular a dead Jewish woman speaks to the reader about the atrocity and suffering she and her race have endured at the hands of Nazis, reliving her own death as part of the Holocaust in the Second World War.
The Title ‘Shooting Stars’ is an ambiguous title referring both to the yellow Star of David which Jewish civilians and prisoners were forced to wear as well as the temporary nature of life in the metaphoricalcomparison of people to meteors that we call shooting stars. The shooting star is a symbol of fleetingness of life. Just as a shooting star flashes in and out of existence in the blink of an eye so too have the lives of the victims of the holocaust been brutally cut short. A third interpretation is that a heroic person who has suffered a tragic end and is deserving of this ‘star’ in the face of adversity is being shot down.
Poetic form • Six stanza poem, each stanza four lines long. • Regular rhythm – standard line lengths – one example of rhyme in the final stanza. • Dramatic monologue in which Duffy gives a voice to someone from whom it has been unjustly taken, as she does in many of her poems. • no end rhyme (free verse)
his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear. Between the gap of corpses I could see a child. The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye. This woman’s observation that ‘Only a matter of days separate/ this from acts of torture now’ suggests both eyewitness involvement at this time –‘this’ and ‘now’ reinforce the sense of immediacy – and an awareness that memory is very short in historical terms.
