Amanda! · Class 10 English · First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

Robin Klein, an Australian writer. It is printed in the poetry section of First Flight.

Stanzas 1, 3, 5 and 7 are spoken aloud by an adult; stanzas 2, 4 and 6 are Amanda's thoughts, printed inside brackets. The alternation never breaks.

An adult, almost certainly a parent and usually taken to be her mother. The complaints — homework, an untidy room, uncleaned shoes, chocolate, posture — are household matters rather than a teacher's.

Biting nails, hunching, slouching, unfinished homework, an untidy room, uncleaned shoes, eating chocolate, acne, not looking at the speaker, sulking and moodiness.

Because not one of the instructions is unreasonable on its own. The poem puts eleven of them end to end with no praise, no question about how she is and no pause — and the effect of the series is nothing like the effect of any one of them.

Twelve times inside the poem, always at the end of a line, and every stanza spoken by the adult finishes with it. Read aloud, it becomes a drumbeat.

Because they are not spoken aloud. Brackets set material apart from the main text, and here they mark a separate, private world that the adult cannot hear a word of.

Amanda herself — and she never speaks a single word aloud in the whole poem.

No. She has withdrawn into daydreams and is taking in nothing. The question has two halves, so both must be answered.

By what she is doing instead: lying at the bottom of a green sea, walking barefoot through dust, sitting at the top of a tower. None of that is going on in a mind attending to instructions about shoes.

No. In seven stanzas nobody notices that the child has gone somewhere else entirely, and the last stanza proves it by getting her completely wrong.

They do not rhyme. They are commands and questions chopped into short units and punctuated with exclamation marks, so that nothing in them flows.

They rhyme in threes, every line of each bracketed stanza chiming with the other two, and they are longer, calmer and unhurried. The music is itself the escape.

Because the ear separates the two worlds before the reader works out why. It is the kind of observation that lifts an answer out of the ordinary.

Amanda's words are soft — languid, drifting, blissfully, hushed, tranquil. The adult's are hard and short — stop, don't, did you, remember. The two never mix.

Two people are in the same room and take strict turns, but neither replies to the other and neither hears the other, so by the end they are further apart than when the poem began.

Reading it in pairs, with each person taking alternate stanzas — and it warns that a surprise is coming.

She never speaks aloud at all. Everything of hers is inside brackets, which is precisely why they are there.

Because homework, a room to tidy, shoes to clean and chocolate to avoid are household matters. A parent fits all of them; a teacher fits almost none.

Who speaks in which stanzas; that the brackets mean unspoken thought; that neither speaker is listening; and that rhyme and punctuation separate the two worlds by sound alone.

Each is three lines long and rhymes aaa — sea, me, blissfully; street, feet, sweet; care, rare, hair. Nine lines of daydream in the whole poem.

A relaxed, emerald-green sea in which she is the only inhabitant — a mermaid moving slowly and happily.

Languid means relaxed; drifting means moving slowly. Both are glossed, and both come from the sea stanza.

Float about exactly as she pleased, unhurried and blissful, with nothing to finish and nowhere to be — and, most importantly, with nobody else in the entire sea to correct her.

That she is the sole inhabitant. It is not just that she is alone; there is nobody else there at all, so there is nobody to tell her to sit up straight.

Because stanza 1 gives four instructions about her body — nails, shoulders, slouching, sitting up straight — and a mermaid is a body that cannot be corrected. It does not sit, it does not slouch; it drifts.

She calls herself an orphan roaming the street, making patterns in soft dust with hushed, bare feet, and says the silence is golden and the freedom sweet.

To make patterns — here, in soft dust with her bare feet.

No. She plainly has at least one parent, who is scolding her from the first line of the poem to the last.

Because an orphan would have nobody to nag her. What she longs for is the silence and the freedom of having nobody to answer to, and an orphan is the only image she has of a child with no parents.

Because a child who can imagine losing her parents as a kind of freedom is telling you exactly how heavy the nagging has become — and she does it without complaining once.

Stanza 3 tells her to clean her shoes; stanza 4 gives her hushed, bare feet. The duty is abolished in the very next stanza.

Quiet. Her feet are hushed, her footsteps make no noise, and the silence is called golden. She wants not company or excitement but the absence of a voice.

The girl in the fairy tale who was shut up in a tower and had very long golden hair, which was let down so that somebody could climb up to her.

For the solitude. She says she has not a care and that life in a tower is calm — tranquil is glossed as calm — and a tower is the most completely private place a child could name, with no door at ground level and no way to walk in.

That she would certainly never let down her bright hair. In the tale the hair is how visitors climb up — Rapunzel's one connection with the world and eventually her rescue. Amanda keeps the tower and refuses the ladder, turning a prison into a choice.

Stanza 5 makes two demands about being seen — remember your acne, look at me when I am speaking to you. So she climbs somewhere nobody can look at her at all, and then removes the only means of reaching her.

Sea, street, tower — alone but out in the open; then out in the world with no family at all; then deliberately shut away and refusing to be reached. They get lonelier each time.

Because the daydreams are not three versions of one wish but a direction of travel, and the direction is the saddest thing in the poem.

The bracketed stanzas — languid, drifting, pattern and tranquil. Not one comes from the scolding.

Somewhere between about nine and sixteen, most probably a young teenager. The clearest clue is the acne, which points to early adolescence; she also has homework and a room to tidy, she is spoken to as a child, and her daydreams reach for mermaids and fairy tales.

Because the poem never states an age. The question asks how you know, so the evidence matters more than the figure.

The acne. It is the one physical detail in the poem that belongs to a particular stage of life.

Freedom — and, more precisely, quiet. In nine lines of daydream she never wishes for friends, games, presents, travel or adventure; she wishes for the absence of a voice.

In the sea she is the only inhabitant; on the street her feet are hushed and the silence is golden; in the tower life is tranquil and nobody can climb up.

That she is imaginative — three complete worlds in nine lines — that she is lonely though she never says so, that she is constantly corrected, and that she is not in the least rebellious.

Because she never argues, never answers back and never refuses to do anything. There is not one word of defiance in the poem. She withdraws rather than fights.

Because rebellion is still a form of contact. Going somewhere else ends the conversation altogether, and nobody in the poem notices that she has gone.

That Amanda should stop sulking at once, that she is always so moody, and that anyone would think she was being nagged.

No. She is absorbed in a daydream — one the reader has now watched three times and the adult has never once suspected. Her silence is withdrawal, not bad temper.

Because a diagnosis is easier than a question. Nobody in the poem asks Amanda anything about herself, so when silence arrives it is labelled at once.

It is the only one in which the adult comments on Amanda's inner state rather than on her body, her duties or her appearance — the first attempt in the poem to say what she is feeling, and it is completely mistaken.

The adult protests that anyone would think she nagged at the girl, immediately after six stanzas of nagging. She has no idea that she is describing herself.

Unintentional irony — a statement that condemns the person who makes it, without their knowing. The poem never criticises the adult in its own voice; it simply lets her finish the sentence.

A bracketed reply. Every other scolding stanza is followed by a daydream; this one is not. The poem ends on the scolding voice, with the daydream unheard and unanswered.

Exactly once, and by the nagger.

Lonely, unhappy and tired. Everything the reader concludes about her is inferred rather than stated.

Give the range first, then four pieces of evidence: the acne, the homework and room, the way she is spoken to, and the fairy-tale imagination.

Say no, she is not sulking; explain that she is in a daydream and that her silence is withdrawal; then finish on the irony of the final line.

That the adult who complains about being thought a nagger has, without noticing, described the whole poem.