Question

what are 3 images of oppression in the first 5 stanzas of "Elsewhere" by Derek Walcott?

Answer 1

Have you read the poem yet?

Answer 2

There are close to a dozen in the first four or five stanzas. Take a chance and guess. You can hardly go wrong in such a target-rich environment.

Answer 3

@LarsEighner Exactly.. I find it had to believe someone could have read the poem without noting at least five images of oppression.

Answer 4

hard*

Answer 5

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea's
weeping, for the fishermen's dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they're tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck.p Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage.p Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

Answer 6

Let's look at it together and try to identify them.

Answer 7

Barbed wire...slave labor in the first stanza. There's 2.

Answer 8

Torture stories is super obvious in the second stanza. Can you find the other 2?