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Soumaya Posted 11 years ago
Grammar

English word order

I am helping a friend in her assignment and i came across this question, which confused me as a teacher. Do you mind helping me out Emotion: smile with a little explanation so I can get it across to her?

Identify one example of the text from the usual subject-verb-object/ complement word order of English?

Using this poem

All the Dead Dears by Sylvia Plath

Rigged poker -stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.
These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We’d wink at if we didn’t hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.
How they grip us through think and thick,
These barnacle dead!
This lady here’s no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she’ll suck
Blood and whistle my narrow clean
To prove it.
As I think now of her hand,
From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair —
All the long gone darlings:
They Get back, though, soon,
Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
Childbirths or a family barbecue:
Any touch, taste, tang’s
Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,
And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
Between tick And tack of the clock, until we go,
Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
Riddled with ghosts, to lie
Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.
  

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2 Answers
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For example:

Line 3: "...with a granite grin this antique museum-cased lady lies..." (Rather than the more normal word order: "This antique museum-cased lady lies with a granite grin.")

Line 16: "...yet kin she is..." (Rather than the more normal word order: "Yet she is kin.")

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