Pere Quart's 'Paid Holidays': A Deep Dive into Exile and Loss

Pere Quart: Paid Holidays

Metric Series

Paid Holidays is a metric series of up to eight stanzas with a variety of metrics and verses without regular rhyme.

Structure

A structure can be established based on the increasingly pathetic gradation, which presents the poetic "I".

• Part One (verses 1-4): It begins with a blunt pair of verses with the term "amén," meaning "so be it," because of the many disappointments that the poet accepts resignedly.
• Part Two (verses 5-7): It temporalizes the enthusiasms and disappointments of belief in the fatherland and the people who left. He identifies with Job (one of the biblical characters who suffered the most misfortune) in the most miserable stage of rejection and marginalization. So then he says with irony that the train will take paid leave, exile. Then he notes that "the land which was our inheritance / flees me" and is defined as "a land without a sky," that is, no hope, no tomorrow.
• Part Three (verses 8-10): However, the poet returns in a final, futile, ironic attempt. Therefore, he desires that the blind have a possible reunion, but now, yes, he says that he will finally go and rediscover the primitive savage state of prehistoric ancestors, even on all fours. In the last stanza, he makes the decision not to jump back into the darkness, a metaphor for suffering, the exiled flooding. With reference to God, he is sarcastic and ironic because God is living in exile, without addressing the human suffering of refugees.

Theme

The decision to go forever. This is already expressed in the first verse, followed by an ironic "amén." In fact, he speaks with the departure of two choruses involved, the end of words: death. Successive returns express a paradoxical love of country. He alludes to a metaphorical exile, purely internal.

Literary Resources

• Sarcasm: For example, the qualification of "paid holidays" to exile, that is, those who fled the land of the poetic "I"; the rejection; the comparison with the penultimate stanza "great-great-grandfather" referring to hominids to be done with all fours; and finally, the conception of God as an exile in the kingdom of the dead. All this gives the composition a bitter and sarcastic touch with the nuance of ironic detachment.
• Religious Items: (e.g., Job)
• Polysyndeton
• Comparisons
• Irony