"Laundrette" paragraph

"Laundrette", written by Liz Lochhead, is a narrative poem about people living in a poor part of the city and the one thing that they have in common together is that in order to wash their clothes they all have to go to a laundrette. This poem is all about mood and atmosphere. Each stanza describes someone or something. For example in stanza 6, the poet is using a lot of symbolic and metaphorical language to describe one of the women's lives while she's waiting for her laundry to finish washing. One excellent example of this is on the second line of the stanza which says "Let them stew in their juice, to a final fankle, twisted, wrung out into a rope, hard to unravel". This has imagery and metaphor because it describes the clothes in the washing machine and it has two meanings, one is about the clothes and the second it could be about her relationship with her family. An example that supports the second meaning is in the line under it which it says"...to a final fankle, twisted, wrung out into rope, hard to unravel..." Fankle is slang for knot or a big mess and the fact that there are words with a similar meaning repeated four times means that she has probably made a big mistake in her family which is not easy to fix. Another example is at the beginning of the stanza in which it says "This women is deadpan..." Deadpan means when someone doesn't show any emotion which means she was very upset and depressed about something which in this case is probably her family. One more example that uses symbolism and metaphor is in the last line of the stanza which says "She sees a kaleidoscope" A Kaleidoscope is a toy shaped like a tube that contains small mirrors and colours inside which appears to to change if you twist the tube. It is a metaphor because it is transferring the quality of the colours in the kaleidoscope to the clothes in a washing machine. The poet is also using figurative language in this example.