 Hello and welcome to our video summarizing everything you need to know about the songs of our cells volume 1 part 2 anthology. My name is Barbara and this is the 12th of a 15 part video series where we examine all 15 poems in this anthology. Now we are going to now look at Citation by Peter Redding examining this poem and analysing it in depth. So let's get started. So Citation is a 23 line poem which doesn't follow a particular rhyme scheme. This poem has been written utilising a variety of line lengths ranging from 13 words to 4. This intrinsic element of variety as well as the initially random seeming line breaks add to the visual and auditory interest. The title of this poem is a word which isn't really common in everyday speech. Citation refers to certain species of ocean animal such as dolphins, whales and the individual verses often break in unexpected places where one would not naturally pause in this speech. In other words, enjambment and of course this draws attention to this and also speeds up and sometimes slows down certain elements of the poem. Additionally, the poet in Citation has chosen to write using short choppy phrases within these long lines. Another aspect that's important to note about Citation is the way that Redding has chosen to construct the poem as more of a narrative than lines of verse. The individual lines are longer than the average poems and he's not put emphasis on rhyme or metre. Now Citation seems to describe a speaker's well-watching experience off the coast of California and the overall grace of the blue whales that this person observes. The poem starts with a speaker stating that it was on an early Sunday morning that he and his companion set out to see the whales and they were intentionally going out to see blue whales and they travelled on a set of islands off the coast of California. The speaker is successful in this quest and in the rest of the poem it's devoted to describing this experience. He frequently makes note of the grace of the bodies of these creatures as well as the general large mass. He's also amazed by the movements and struck by the diminutive nature of their dorsal fins. The whales that he witnesses dive back under the water rolling through the waves showing off the markings of the bodies and the display finally ends when they dive into the depths leaving the narrator with the image of their flukes or tail fins. Now when we look in more detail at lines 1-8 the poet starts with the speaker describing the setting. Now due to the format of Redding's writing in this poem it seems that it's more of a reading to understand the first few lines and the words seem to kind of appear out of order and they seem quite choppy and it's a very unusual way of writing. Now the speaker in this poem and his unnamed companions appear to be setting off from San Francisco really early on a Sunday morning. They've left behind Fisherman's Wharf and are headed out to sea. Now these simple phrases at the start of the poem are really evocative and they bring to mind endless images of the tossing ocean and the hardy sailors setting out on a great quest and taken in tandem in other words taken together with the title. One might assume that this is the beginning of a hunt. The men seem really sure of themselves. The poem then continues to describe a closer element of the setting. The boat itself and the speaker looks around and he knows that the vessel is 63 feet from bow to stern or front to back. Now this provides more context as well as the reason for the trip. We learn that the speaker and his companions are setting off in the hopes of seeing blue wells off the group of islands in the Californian coast. Now this poem is not about whether or not the speaker will see the wells though as the following lines confirm. He sees the wells as they come quite close to the boat. They're swimming and rising slowly from the water. They breach at an angle and appear as gray slate. The bodies are described as being covered with white mottling and they are compared to the overall size of the bodies and the dorsal fin seem really tiny. In the final line of this section the speaker states that they have broad flat heads which are actually impressively large and the speaker seems to know a lot about these creatures and relays scientifically to the reader that there were one quarter of the overall body lengths. Now in lines 9 to 17 the speaker continues to describe the interaction he has with these blue wells. After the wells surface they come up, they blow out water and these streaks are enormous and straight and slim as upright columns to quote from the poem. In fact this water rises to 30 feet and this is a fact that clearly impresses the speaker. He sees this creatures are really beautiful and impressive and in the next lines the show is suddenly over. The wells descend back into the water and momentarily disappear and the speaker tries to evoke a sense of loss. It's as though they described seeing something really wonderful and then it's suddenly taken away. The wells seem gone from the surface but they could still be seeing rolling through the waters. Now in lines 18 to 23 the speaker brings the narrative of the well watching to a close. He seems to have glimpsed the mass of the wells and being impressed by their biological distinctiveness. He also notes the fact that they rolled as he wants more quartzite of their diminutive dorsals and of course pay attention to the alliteration here. Now in the last two lines the wells departed from the scenes entirely. They arched up the backs and tails and the speaker knows that they're getting ready to dive. They do so and the last thing that the speaker is able to see are the flukes or their tail fins and one can easily imagine the grace of these movements and the true sense of loss at the speaker experiences when the wells are truly and finally out of sight. So that's all. If you found this video useful, we'd really appreciate it if you gave it a big thumbs up and also considered subscribing to our channel but also make sure you visit our website www.firstreadjudas.com there you will find a wealth of courses as well as model answers when it comes to English and especially with this anthology and and indeed other areas of English that you might need to improve on particularly if you're doing so under timed conditions. Thank you so much for listening.