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THE FALLING LEAVES ANALYSIS
Hello welcome to another tutorial video, so now we’re going to look at ‘The Falling
Leaves’. Again we’re going to analyse it with SMILE. A very short poem, really strong
idea coming through, very powerful.
We start with structure and basically this whole thing is one long sentence. If you actually
look all the way through you’ve just got commas, commas, commas, commas, commas and
only one full stop because we’re being invited on this long developed thought of this moment,
what she’s seeing and then what she’s actually linked it to ultimately. So she wants
us to follow in the train of thought and that’s why it just stays as one long sentence of
her perspective and her thoughts on what the deaths in war can be likened to.
It starts and ends with images of death, although not directly. So here we’ve got ‘the brown
leaves dropping’ and we’ve got ‘the snowflakes falling’ and obviously there’s
a final reference to the ‘Flemish clay’ area of Belgium where the majority, or a lot
of fighting happened in the First World War.
We’ve got the enjambment which allows us to stop and consider and think about things
as if she’s actually talking about them or seeing them, so that we’re kind of paused
in the moment. ‘I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree in a still afternoon’ and
‘I wandered slowly thence for thinking of a gallant multitude’. And so again the enjambment
in all those cases just really helps us stop and consider what’s about to come and join
her in her imagining and what she’s seeing.
And we’ve got a very complicated rhyme scheme going through this whole piece. You can work
it out again yourselves, but basically the complication of it is to give it a very natural
feel, like a moving feel, kind of the natural rhythms and cadences we have in the sounds
of nature, etc., rather than that something that’s kind of man made and limited in a
certain way, as you know normal a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d rhyme scheme would be, this one’s
a lot more developed than that.
Then we’ve also got – it’s almost generally six syllables and then ten syllables in a
line, I think there’s one or two exceptions to that, but generally there’s six and ten,
so it’s kind of like again something short, something long, which kind of shows again
just the reflection of the kind of thought and what it means, which is basically what
this whole poem is about. She sees something and then she talks about what it means.
We move on then to the meanings. So first of all the meaning we’ve got the idea of
death which is dropped in all the way through. We’ve got the ‘wiping out’ and ‘the
gallant multitude’ who die and they’re ‘slain’ and then we’ve got ‘the snowflakes
falling’ and obviously the ‘brown leaves dropping’, so there’s lots of ideas here
about death and the death of the soldiers and obviously a death that’s not at its
time and perhaps a brave but foolish death, and quite a violent death as well with the
phrase ‘wiping’.
We’ve got war from another perspective. Here we’re just looking at not perhaps one
side over another or the futility, etc., we’re just thinking more about the masses of death,
just people dropping like leaves. Any time you walk around during autumn and you say
thousands of millions of trees all over the place and obviously likening them to the falling
leaves just shows again the great numbers of people that were actually dying and this
is from someone who – I don’t think she was a pacifist, I think in the First World
War she was an objector but in the Second World War I think she supported it – but
here we have the idea that she’s just looking at it from the perspective, just this loss
of human life, nothing damning about it, even the tone maybe I should say is very different,
maybe not the perspective itself, because obviously the waste of life, which is the
next meaning point that obviously comes across when we’re looking, that’s really showing
through the word ‘multitude’, the amount of people actually dying and this could refer
to the amount from both sides maybe and not just one side.
And here we’ve got the ‘no wind had actually stirred them’ when she kind of shows it
was unnatural because normally when we have the falling leaves, they fall in a breeze
you could say, but here there’s no wind which kind of reflects the unnatural situation
of them falling and then the unnatural situation of man to be at war on such a mass scale.
And then there is the idea of war being unnatural and obviously here the fact that they’re
slain as well and they’re not slain by the normal things, like disease or illness, they’re
slain by other men and machines killing them. And obviously again they’re strewed, they’re
just kind of left, gunned down or whatever it may be, however they died. And the idea
of strewed and gunned down is very important for the First World War, which was just setting
up a few hundred metres apart and just gunning each other to death. It was a terrible waste
of life.
We’ll look at images then; what types of scenes are presented. Obviously we get the
idea of death coming through again from the colour of the leaves and the word ‘dropping’
and the ‘wiping out’ and the ‘slaying’, so death comes through to us again and again
and again. But it comes through in very soft images, kind of comparing it to a cyclical
part of nature and what happens and just its place in the scheme of things and maybe this
is man’s nature to do this to each other.
Then we’ve got the image of no wind, which is very interesting because in autumn we’d
expect it to be a little bit colder and that’s why there’s brown leaves during that time,
but here obviously something is missing and the ‘wind whirling them, whistling to the
sky’, all of that is missing in that poem but she goes to great lengths to actually
talk about it and she stresses the idea of how unnatural their deaths are in that situation.
And also the image of the cause of death by mentioning the causes that doesn’t take
them, then obviously it kind of highlights all the more the cause that does, because
these two here are obviously huge killers and that’s how people are expected to die
or more often than not die, but obviously when a war comes into the frame then things
are very different.
So the language we’ve got. We’ve got very graphic language in ‘the wiping out’,
it’s a reference not only to the snowflakes as they fall, covering up part of the day,
seemingly covering up part of the day; it’s obviously a reference to the soldiers dying
en mass and whole battalions being wiped out, which is again what happened in World War
One in particular.
Moving on we’ve got the alliteration and onomatopoeia in the ‘wind whirled them whistling’,
so we’ve got lots of sounds there just to give us the real evocation, just to really
drive that home and make it more ever present in our minds. And again, the contrast of actually
describing something really well and describing its absence just makes it all the more stark
and again this is really very powerful going along with this different perspective that
the poet’s taking all in all.
We’ve got the word ‘multitude’ as well, which kind of shows the great amounts, this
huge, this brave, amount of people, a massive amount of people, which just signifies for
us the great numbers of people that died.
So what’s the effect on the reader then? Well it kind of makes us question or consider
our own ideas of war. How do we feel about it? What do we compare it to? How do we put
it in a frame of reference for ourselves? What will remind us of it? It makes us think
about the amounts of the dead soldiers, to be compared in this way to leaves dropping
and here we’re just referencing the First World War because the line here ‘Flemish
clay’, the reference to Belgium, but when we think about so many other wars that have
been fought throughout time and the amounts of people that have actually been killed,
it really, really does stack up.
And then we’ve got the idea as well of the cycle of life and nature. The trees will fall,
etc., and the snowflakes will fall and maybe in that certain way men were meant to fall,
in whichever way it was decreed for them or their lives actually took them to, which in
this case was through war.
So there’s lots of other things that you can pick out from them, but that should be
a good start to get you going. 1