Language+-+Seasons+as+metaphors

media type="custom" key="11387792" media type="custom" key="12174422" What time of year is this? What happens at this time? What kind of metaphor could Autumn leaves be used to symbolise? Look at the first pages of The Year of Wonders. The quote locates us in the year of the Plague, Autumn, in 1666. The chapter heading suggests something positive - a harvest. But first sentence is in the past tense. "I used to love this season." As readers we ask the question - why doesn't the narrator like apple picking time now? Look at the literary techniques that abound in the first paragraph. Assonance - wood/door/food/wood - tang/sap/hay/made - rumble/tumble. Alliteration - sap still speaking/ smells and sights and sounds/fallen fruit and wet wood. These features work to create a musicality and rhythm to the passage which suggest a unity between humans and nature. A unity that has been shattered.

If we look at the description of Anna’s son Jamie’s death – we see another kind of writing all together. There is alliteration - five days/finally/fit and rising in rings coupled with brutal descriptive language - vivid crimson welts, flesh eating inside of hime, putrefying meat. Perhaps therefore the apple picking time is a precursor to rotting apples -to death.