Chapter 13

The Czech Coronasong

This paper investigates poetic devices related to COVID-19 used in the Czech Republic during the pandemic from a multimodal perspective. In March 2020, live stage theatres worldwide stopped operating due to the outbreak of COVID-19. In response, many theatres began broadcasting and streaming artistic works online. In many of these works, we can see recurring symbols of contagion, disinfection, life, and death, and living at the edge of death. In this chapter, we analyse poetic devices in one such work, the short but representative Coronasong, which was performed and broadcast by the National Theater of Brno and quickly achieved a large audience on social networks. We address how various factors across modalities of expression play a role in making Coronasong a unique artistic response to the COVID-related restrictions. The factors considered include metaphor, metonymy, polysemy, rhyming, dialectal variation, facial expression, body language, melody, and other elements of music. We demonstrate in this paper how the poetic effect can be analysed against the backdrop of the lockdown during the pandemic, advocating a more contextualized approach of multimodal poetic analysis beyond a mere text-based approach.