Belfast Confetti

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Besides, he asks, “Why can’t I escape.” It means the helplessness in the heart of the poet. Even though he wishes to leave and even though he knows that he has survived, he is unable to get rid of his helplessness about being unable to help those who lost their lives in the riot. He has witnessed the death of several people right in front of his eyes, due to which he just can’t forget the violent memories.

Belfast Confetti - Belfast Confetti - CCEA - GCSE English

The following poems similarly showcase the themes included in Ciaran Carson’s haunting lyric ‘Belfast Confetti’.

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Carson has used past tense to describe the violence held against the Catholic crowd in the place. He has used the same tense to portray the different effects of being in the middle of the conflict. He has survived and there is absolutely no doubt about how tough his survival was, from the riot. However, he is still not able to forget the haunting scenes. He has seen everything with his own eyes and heard the fearful screams of those, who lost their lives to the hands of merciless troops. Carson wanted to be there with the ones, who were being discriminated against without any reason; he wanted to help them, but he simply couldn’t, because the scene and the terror had frightened him as much as it had frightened them. Line 2: “N,” “ts,” “b,” “t,” “s,” “n,” “s,” “c,” “k,” “s,” “n,” “t,” “b,” “k,” “n,” “t,” “n,” “x,” “p,” “n”

Belfast Confetti - Poetry Archive

Peter Barry (2000). Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Manchester University Press. pp.226–. ISBN 978-0-7190-5594-2. Carson has adopted a narrative style in this poem ‘Belfast Confetti’ to depict an entire scene to the readers. They can feel the horrifying scene just like it is depicted by the poet. By reading this poem, one can easily understand the pain that the scene and the riot must have caused to the poet. I'mtakingmyEnglishLitreatureGCSEthisyear-1-9Edexel(2018)andI'mstrugglingtomemoriseeverysinglepoem,withquotations.IwaswonderingifIcouldgetawaywithstudyingafewpoemsindepth,thatmoreorlesscancomparetoanyotherpoem,suchasHalfcaste,TheClassGameorExposureandafewmore.Andjustknowtheothersbriefly?The allegory of using punctuation to symbolises the horrors of the riot continues here. Carson identifies how full ‘stops’ and ‘colons’ act like a barrier between two sentences or clauses in literature and transfers this to barriers, likely scattered debris, to the riot-torn streets. Belfast Confetti’by Ciaran Carson describes a speaker watching the live scene after the riot between the shipyard workers, who were the Protestants, and the Catholics. Note the shift from past to present tense that occurs in the second stanza. This has the effect of strengthening the reader’s connection with the narrator and making his thoughts seem more pivotal. The hidden meaning behind his words means that even if he has escaped the riot and survived, he will never be able to get rid of the sight that he witnessed; the violent scene is going to haunt his memories forever. Line 8: “S,” “r,” “c,” “n,” “K,” “r,” “m,” “n,” “m,” “sh,” “M,” “k,” “r,” “c,” “sh,” “s,” “W,” “k,” “k,” “s,” “W,” “s”

Form and structure - Belfast Confetti - CCEA - BBC

Carson’s speaker describes the war-like situation in the second line. The speaker can imagine a found of broken images floating in his mind and hear the sound of the explosion. In this line, the phrase, “Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys” hints at the scrap metals used as weapons by the Protestants during the “Troubles” in Ireland. This poem is about the conflict between the Catholics and Protestants, known as The Troubles, when in the 1960’s the Catholic community claimed they were being discriminated against by the Protestants.To understand this language we must reflect on the asterisk and its uses. It is used to mark significance in a piece of text. Carson relates this idea of significance to an ‘explosion’. Carson creatively comments on the caesura of this line here as well – saying that the hyphen gives the spoken narrative a choppiness just like a ‘burst f rapid [machine gun] fire’.