Belfast Confetti

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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. I'mtakingmyEnglishLitreatureGCSEthisyear-1-9Edexel(2018)andI'mstrugglingtomemoriseeverysinglepoem,withquotations.IwaswonderingifIcouldgetawaywithstudyingafewpoemsindepth,thatmoreorlesscancomparetoanyotherpoem,suchasHalfcaste,TheClassGameorExposureandafewmore.Andjustknowtheothersbriefly? 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. The third line contains references to two punctuation marks, asterisk, and hyphen. Here, “an asterisk” depicts the sparkles that were born due to the explosions during the fight. The “hyphenated line” is metaphorically connected with the “burst of rapid fire”. There is an ellipsis at the end of this line referring to the continuation of events.

Ciaran Carson – Belfast Confetti | Genius

This poem is about the aftermath of the “Troubles” that were an ethnic-nationalist period of conflict in Northern Ireland. The situation lasted for 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It is also known as the Northern Ireland conflict. The poet describes the aftermath of the sectarian riot in Belfast. His speaker describes how the confusion outside leads to a chain of internal confusions. He cannot think properly. The events that he observed keep flooding his mind, leaving him only with questions. 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 rhetorical question creates a tone of desperation. The short, heavily punctuated, sentences, once again, give a choppy quality to the narrative. Now, this choppiness seems to signify the distress and his desperation to escape the riot.

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The narrator’s inability to ‘complete a sentence in [his] head’ is a metaphor for the chaos and irrationality of the riot and the disorientating effect this is having on his composure. The word ‘stuttering’ reinforces this idea, whilst conveying the harsh sounds of the battlefield (links to ‘rapid fire’) as it is onomatopoeic for machine gun fire. The poet has also used the present tense to portray a live scene of what he went through during the time he witnessed the violence. He has used this tense to describe his experience and the aftermath of the riot.

Form and structure - Belfast Confetti - CCEA - BBC

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" was written by the Irish poet Ciaran Carson and published in the collection The Irish for No in 1987. In the poem, an unnamed speaker appears to be caught up in a bomb blast and tries to escape. The poem then explores the relationship between violence and language itself, as the disoriented speaker searches for an escape route. According to Carson, the poem is set in August 1969 during the Troubles, a violent conflict that took place in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. The fourth line, “I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering” means that the speaker finds it difficult to depict in words the terror that his eyes witnessed. He tried finding an escape, but he couldn’t.The poem begins in media res with the riot squad moving in. The effect is to plunge the reader immediately into the terror and violence of the riot. The allegory of Carson using punctuation to portray the violence begins as he describes it as ‘raining exclamation marks’.

Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson test questions - CCEA - BBC Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson test questions - CCEA - BBC

The poem ‘Belfast Confetti,’ one of the best-known poems of Ciaran Carson, pulls the reader into the aftermath of Belfast’s sectarian riot. He has used punctuationto symbolize missiles that Protestants used during this riot, which was against the Catholic crowd in Belfast. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats– It’s another poem that describes the Easter Rising from the history of Ireland. This poem is regarded as one of the popular poems of W.B. Yeats. Explore more poems from W.B. Yeats.

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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.