Analyse "Watching for Dolphins" en Anglais

Assignment Watching For Dolphins

"Watching For Dolphins" is a poem written by David Constantine, an English university lecturer/ writer/ poet, published in the year 1983 for which he won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 2002. The poem details the experience of a group of passengers waiting to see wild dolphins on a ship bound for Piraeus, Greece. Thereby, we will see how Constantine uses the settings, the characters, the subject of the poem and the literary features to generate strong feeling about nature in his poem.

The two first stanzas of the poem establishes the poem's setting but also presents the poem's speaker and the passengers on board. The first line gives the reader the conditions on what is happening. We know that it takes place on a ferry going to Piraeus, a port city in Greece during the "summer months".The words "summer months" set a warm, positive and optimistic mood which is quite ironic because through out the poem,the passengers try being optimistic but yet end up disapointed because what they're waiting for never comes.In line 2, the speaker starts with "one noticed..." which suggests that the speaker is isolating himself from the whole scene. This gives the feeling that the speaker is an omniscient observer,similar to a god.The focus then shifts to the passengers who are there to see the dolphins and Constantine made sure to point out that there was a good number of passengers:"certain passengers","packed saloon".Constantine took the time to describe the different passengers such as " the lovers", "a fat man" and " the children". He supposedly described the passengers to prove that dolphins can interest more than one age group.They are very enthousiastic and hopeful to see the dolphins but when they realize that they're not going to come, they feel "sad"and "hopeful". The dolphins are described as victims of the passengers who came with equipment such as phones to disturb their tranquility because of the technology.

The whole poem is about passengers' desire to see dolphins. Their desire can be divided into several sections. One of them is their aspiration to meet these funny, lively and beautiful creatures in their natural habitat. This is the kind of experience that people on such a trip would love witnessing. On the other section, the dolphins represent something extraordinary. It becomes obvious that the dolphins have become symbolic of a deep, spiritual experience, something that will give a meaning and a kind of depth into their mysterious lives because we don't know anything about them. Giving dolphins a significance in this poem , transformed them into a symbol, which allows the poem to see the passenger's real motivations and their desires without being too precise. Therefore, the dolphins represent a profound, spiritual experience.

Constantine uses quite a few literary devices in this poem to add specific effects. As said earlier, the enjambment from line 3 to 4: “serious/ Looks…” gives a sense of rushing to the poem, just as if they‘re running out of time. Moreover, the poet uses similes such as “like a saint” on line 10 or “like satyrs” on line 25 which refers to the symbolic layer of the poem. Last but not least, line

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