Towards a “Better Thesis” for Analysis of “Very Simply Topping Up the Brake Fluid”
- Read Armitage’s poem and consider your own evaluative and interpretive response, as well as matters of rhythm, rhyme, diction, and voice.
- Review the following pieces of analytical data, gleaned from close reading, making sure that you understand each point:
The poem is a dramatic monologue, like Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.
It contains all the conventions of a dramatic monologue, including a speaker whose persona is clearly distinct from that of the poet (a car mechanic), a silent auditor who listens to the speech (a woman who has brought in her car to have the brake fluid topped up), an occasion for the speech (the mechanic explaining to the woman how to top up the brake fluid), and – arguably – a sense of the ironic distance between author and speaker (Armitage’s tone is critical, as the mechanic’s manner toward the woman is patronizing, as is made most clear in the final words, “Tell your husband” [line 24]).
The diction is plain, and there are several indications that Armitage wants to mimic the colloquial speech of the mechanic,
for example when the speaker says, “Go on, it won’t / eat you” (lines 4-5), or in the frequent reference to the silent auditor as “love” (lines 1, 10, 19, 22). Further, the rhythms of plain speech are reinforced by the consistent use of both enjambment and caesura throughout the poem. Finally, the speech of the mechanic seems realistic due to his use of technical language to describe the car parts, for example the “fan-belt” (line 5), the “spade connector” (line 7), and the “float-chamber” (line 13).
In tension with Armitage’s efforts to mimic the plain speech of his speaker are the poem’s strict meter and rhyme scheme.
Each line is written in hendecasyllables (or, each line has eleven syllables) and the rhyme scheme for each stanza is ABBA, though many of the rhymes are slant rhymes (or words that almost rhyme, such as “fluid” [line 2] and “toolkit” [line 3]).
Review the following:
Copy and paste the following template into the text box below to create a more complex thesis statement. On the next slide you can export your response to continue your work on it.
- Armitage, Simon. “Very Simply Topping Up the Brake Fluid.” The Broadview Introduction to Literature, edited by Lisa Chalykoff, Neta Gordon, & Paul Lumsden, 2nd ed., Broadview Press, 2018, p. 1256. ↵
