Havisham Literary Elements

Miss Havisham from Great Expectations

This poem is split into four stanzas with four lines each, but it follows no specific poetic form and does not have a steady meter.

"Prayed for it
so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,
ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with."

The speaker has prayed for the death of the man who left her so much that it has changed the color and consistency of her eyes, and she imagines ropes growing out of her hands. These images are metaphors, but they also seem to represent the narrator's degrading sanity, for she seems to believe that her body has changed, grown fantastic.

"Whole days
in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall;"

Here the speaker implictly compares herself to a raven or a crow. Through this metaphor, she indicates that she has lost her humanity and lost the ability to do anything but caw, like she does here, from her anguish.

"Love’s
hate behind a white veil;"

Here she either says that love is hate disguised by a white veil or that love's hate is behind a white veil. Either way, she compares hate to the bride under that veil, waiting to be uncovered.

"Spinster. I stink and remember."

This line uses both alliteration and assonance. The "i" sound in "spinster" is quickly repeated in "stink," and "spinster" creates an internal rhyme with "remember." The repeated "s" sounds create a hissing effect, which feels suitable for this creepy but sensual poem.

"a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding cake."

This use of alliteration emphasizes the noise of the balloon bursting and the stabbing gesture that the speaker makes.

Poetry

Miss Havisham's house

The tone borders on insane; the speaker seems at times desperate, at times cynical.

The protaganist is the speaker, Miss Havisham. The antagonist is her ex-fiancé, who appears mostly as a body, not a person.

The main interpersonal conflict in this poem is between Miss Havisham and the lover who once left her at the altar and stole her money. Just as significant, however, is the internal conflict the speaker feels. She has difficulty differentiating between love and hatred, and her obsession with the wedding that did not occur conflicts with the amount of time that has passed since her jilting.

The tone of "Havisham" is fairly steady, but the speaker has what seems like a moment of clarity in the sentence that ends the third stanza and begins the fourth, when she says, "Love's/hate behind a white veil; a red balloon/bursting in my face." This line is complicated by the ambiguity of "love's hate," but when the speaker mentions the red balloon that bursts, she confronts her own disappointment with lucidity.

In the first stanza, the speaker wishes the man who left her at the altar dead. This foreshadows the later appearances of the "lost body" and the "male corpse," which seem to represent both that man and his absence.

the dress
yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe

This is not a sure case of personification—it could be the dress itself "trembling" (which would be personification), or it could be the speaker herself. This ambiguity has the effect of likening the two.

"Whole days
in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall;"

In this example of onomatopoeia, the speaker draws out the "No" to fully express the extent of her insanity and pain.

"...a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding cake."

Here, the speaker drily says the sound that the red balloon makes when it bursts; this flatness comes off as sarcastic, emphasizing the equally sarcastic tone of the final line.

"Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks."

Here the speaker stammers over the word "breaks." This is an example of the difficulty she has developed with language; her words become sounds. Yet the tone here is sardonic, almost threateningly so. She does not specify what does break, beyond her language and her heart, but that omission makes the line all the more menacing.