Belfast Confetti

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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. He was bestowed with the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize for “The Irish For No” (1987) and has also won the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for ‘Belfast Confetti’. Besides being an author and a novelist, he is also a well-known musician and columnist. He has still not left his pen. 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. 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. 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

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. 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.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’. Half-casteandNoProblem-challengingracismindifferentways(personallyIwouldlookmoreatcomparingHalf-castetoTheClassGame) 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. 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.

Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson - Poem Analysis

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.

Summer 1969 by Seamus Heaney– It’s one of the best-known Seamus Heaney poems. This poem was written during the Ulster riots of 1969 and explores the theme of conflict. Read more Seamus Heaney poems. 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’.

9-1 conflict poetry comparisons - The Student Room edexcel 9-1 conflict poetry comparisons - The Student Room

Ciaran Carson, the poet of ‘Belfast Confetti,’ was born in the year 1948. He is not only a poet but also an amazing novelist, who is cherished by almost all those who love literature. Born and brought up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he writes both poetry and prose, which is often heavily influenced by his Irish roots. 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 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.

To signify the war-like brutality of the riot, Carson includes a list of things synonymous with war – at first look we can see how the ‘shield’ and ‘walkie-talkies’ fit here. However, diving deeper ‘A Saracen’ is a word used by Christians in the medieval ages for Muslims. In these times conflict between both religious groups was harsh and frequent – hence, the violent connotations which Carson captures. 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. 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. 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.