A Child’s Christmas In Wales

This story is, in essence, a story about the power and manipulation of memory. We read an adult’s recreation of childhood memories, but the cool thing is we never really know if it is the adult speaking or the child speaking--or perhaps it is simply a dream of a recreated perfectness and a desire to return to that perfectness as an adult.

The reality of the exam is for your to answer the prompt--and that might take some research. There is not way for you to be totally ready to write a true analysis after one reading without further study. So research, read again and figure out a direction to go.

Some students get stuck on the setup before the quote. The Setup for the paragraph focuses on the sentence building techniques you have already studied and should be something like this:

When Thomas describes the scene in the garden when he and Jim are “hunting cats,” he employs a variety of figurative writing techniques, including: parallel structure, similes, metaphors, muscular verbs, and images and actions to paint a scene of young boys engaged in imaginative play:

But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous,[parallel structure] our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared. [ Child’s Christmas in Wales.]

[and in your head and heart] Thomas uses parallel structure to blah blah blah...You can even throw in more phrases and sentences in your head and heart to further prove your point.

I can help you in class, but don’t wait for that time. Get started writing now.

Here is an essay written by a Fenn Student--and a good one: https://www.thefennvoice.org/nicholas2019/2018/12/a-childs-christmas-in-wales-literary-analysis.html

And another by Timmy Smith: https://www.thefennvoice.org/smith2019/2018/12/a-childs-christmas-in-wales.html

More Resources:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/childs-christmas-wales-dylan-thomas-1955

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child%27s_Christmas_in_Wales

And another good essay!

https://thelifeofhenry.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/literary-analysis-of-the-dylan-thomas-story-a-childs-christmas-in-wales/

Get at it. Words will come...