MPP – 12

My analysis of other contemporary illustrators of poetry highlighted how the most successful examples take key aspects from the text and illustrate just these.

I decided to do this with my poem; extracting key words and themes, then regrouping them, then exploring these concepts. The words I extracted were:

trapped
contorted
walls
scary
gloom
prison
lace
dark
free
light
swallow
rage
passion
tears
tableau
frozen
masquerade

I grouped these words into:

Negative words
Positive words
Emotional words
Words relating to the denouement

NEGATIVE WORDS:All the negative words evoke feelings of darkness, imprisonment, fear and discomfort. One imagines looming shadows, night terrors, nightmares. Figures in silhouette. Brings to mind shadow play and shadow puppetry.

POSITIVE WORDS
All the positive words evoke feelings of freedom and light. The light symbolises freedom from the darkness. One also gets a feeling of flight, of flying away with wings. This relates to her desire to fly away from her prison. The swallow imagery applies to the feeling she gets when ‘dancing’ and to the feeling of no longer being trapped. The qualities of a swallow can be applied to different aspects of teh illustrations – the slender, streamlined body; pointed wings; 9 primary feathers.

EMOTIONAL WORDS
The emotive words are all emotions that can be shown on the face. They can all be associated with positive and negative emotions. How will these emotions shown on her face change throughout the story?

DENOUEMENT
The words relating to the denouement of the story create an image of a diorama, a scene, frozen in time. The stage of a theatre with nothing moving. It’s not that she cannot move, it’s that she doesn’t know she’s supposed to. This is not like being frozen on stage due to stage fright. She is finally confident. This is naive ignorance. This is where the tragedy lies.

Below is an image from my sketchbook exploring the above.

Deconstructing my poem