Look We Have Coming to Dover!

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The structure of each stanza is identical, and if turned sideways resembles waves, forming a shape-poem.

The title is ungrammatical, Nagra teasing his own people for their incorrect English with gentle humour. One example is “ Bedford van” which became a well known piece of British culture throughout the 20th century, including many wartime vehicles branded as “Bedford”. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. by Daljit Nagra tells of the arrival of immigrants to England and of their lives filled with hard work, fears, and dreams.Learn more about the White Cliffs of Dover—and the ways that immigration (and invasion) have shaped British culture. This could cause many different reactions, such as an immediate assumption that the poem is written by someone with a poor grasp of the English language, or that the idea of immigration is being mocked in some way. This poem is about the experience of immigrants to England, and has been cleverly written to be read in parallel with Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.

A dramatic monologue spoken by a new immigrant to England, it portrays a group of immigrants' first years in the country—from their dangerous arrival, to their under-the-table jobs, to their wistful hopes for the future. Some readers could also interpret this as continuing the idea of foreign languages and speech, with these pauses representing the thinking and consideration for new words when a non-native speaker is using another language.Beyond the title, there is a reference to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” which is a lyrical poem looking at transitions from old to new and the loneliness that this can cause for an individual. When looking at the poem as a whole the changes in line length become clearer, with each stanza progressing from short lines to long lines, before restarting the cycle for the next stanza.

Borrowing Neil Bloodaxe Astley's words re poetry, this is poetry which exudes 'the fullest and most subtle flavour'. The poem is a dramatic monologue, the voice that of the poet, using the first person plural ‘we’ and in the last stanza ‘I’. It wants to be fun but it just comes off as foolish, and I was left asking why I paid for someone else's indulgence. They are seeking out lives that aren’t marked by fear and would love to be accepted into the normal culture of the day in which they didn’t have to hide.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading. I confess that most modern poetry makes my teeth ache with boredom because it's so earnest and glum and 'look-how-cleverly-I-put-that! Literature is one of her greatest passions which she pursues through analyzing poetry on Poem Analysis. Although many of the poems dwell on darker themes -- racism, oppression, arranged marriages -- the prevailing tone is one of exuberance and charm, as exemplified by the first and last poems of the collection.