Guides to poetry by Duffy, Armitage and Pre-1914 Poets

Task: You will work in pairs to produce a revision guide to one of the following poems (I will tell you which one). It must be suitable for use by other Year 11s. The aim of this is both to help you to revise the poems for your English Literature examination, and for you, as a class, to produce a pack of revision guides. This task must be complete by the end of today’s lesson.

Poems to cover:

Duffy
Anne Hathaway
Before You Were Mine
Havisham
Stealing

Armitage
Mother, any distance
...

Teacher’s Note

This guide has been tested successfully with students and gives them ways for them to develop a much deeper response to literature, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on poetry. It also shows how to analyse at the levels of form, structure and language – the first two of which seem to cause near universal difficulties.

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Studying For The Exam

The title of this AQA A2 Unit is Reading for Meaning – Love through the Ages. It is worth taking a moment to consider the significance of the title. What are your thoughts? What ‘meaning’ exactly is the exam asking you to elicit? Is your interpretation of what a text means necessarily the same as someone else’s?

“Meaning” is created when language works to signify a response in...

Scheme

• AQA GCSE English Literature Unit 1 Relationships Cluster Scheme.docx

Associated Resources

Intro

• Intro Poems.docx
• Themes.docx
• Intro.ppt
• Code Breaker.docx

Essay Writing

• Essay Writing.ppt
• Essay Writing 2.ppt
• Essay Writing 3.ppt
• STIRRLS.docx
• STIRRLS all poems.docx
• Example questions.ppt
• C grade.docx

Sample Essays

• Essay B.pdf
• Essay C.pdf

Quickdraw

• Quickdraw.ppt
• Police Statement Pro Forma.pdf
• PEE Table.docx
• Starter Predictions.docx

‘Born Yesterday’ by Philip Larkin

• Newspaper article.docx
• First verse.docx
• Born Yesterday student...

Brief

Write a monologue for a character from a literary text you have read.

Image: La Ghirlandata by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Scheme

• AQA GCSE English Literature Unit 3b Sister Maude Monologue Scheme.docx

Associated Resources

• Punctuation.docx
• Mono Opening.docx
• Victorian Female.docx
• Semi Colon Revision.docx
• Sister Maude.pptx
• Reptile - passage from Sister Maude.pptx
• Reptile.pdf
• Maude’s Thoughts.docx
• Imagery Sister Maude.docx
• Thoughts and Feelings.docx
• What I need to do for a grade C or above.docx

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

Queen Victoria’s Reign 1837-1901

‘It is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a snob.’ William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863

‘Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display,...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

Introduction

I think it is important to acknowledge at the outset that this is not an especially easy examination for which to prepare students. In my experience, no matter how much work you do with them on your chosen texts, even the most diligent and able of your pupils are going to enter the exam room with somewhat of a sense of unease; indeed, I’ve found that the more hard-work the pupil puts in, the more ideas...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

In this examination you are required to answer two questions. There is no choice and each question carries the same number of marks – 40 for each question, so obviously you need to give them equal time and attention.

You must familiarise yourself fully with what is required of you because if you do not follow the instructions correctly you will lose marks, no matter how brilliant your wrong answer is.

So,...

• Aspens.ppt

Alfred Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade

Overview and Context

Written following the disastrous 1854 Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, this poem can be read as both jingoistic and as highlighting the horrors of war. Whilst Tennyson was Poet Laureate at the time and might have been expected to produce patriotic poetry, there is a...

Wilfred Owen’s Futility

Overview and Context

Futility is one of the 5 poems that WW1 poet Owen had published during his lifetime. Composed most likely in Ripon – though perhaps in Scarborough – this lyric is set against the First World War, a kind of macrocosm when placed against the feud in Verona in Romeo and Juliet. It explores the...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43

Overview and Context

Browning wrote a 44 sonnet series about her love for her fiancé Robert Browning which was never intended for publication. It was entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese with the title stemming from the epithet ‘my little Portugee’ Browning used for her. Sonnet 43 is a Petrarchan sonnet...

Andrew Marvel’s To His Coy Mistress

Overview and Context

The poem might be viewed as a literary exercise in logic as much as a ‘love’ poem’. Marvell’s speaker uses a tripartite structure to follow his argument to its conclusion, effectively forming a ‘syllogism’.

Love and Conflict

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare explores several themes but perhaps the twin themes of love and conflict were uppermost in his mind when he conceived and wrote the play. At GCSE, the play is often used as part of a controlled assessment task in which students explore the presentation of one of these themes and compare it with...

This anthology is used for the following courses:

GCSE English Spec Code 4700
GCSE English Language Spec Code 4705
GCSE English Literature Spec Code 4710

The Anthology can also be used for Controlled Assessments in the following:

GCSE English Literature Unit 5: Exploring poetry
GCSE English Unit 3: Understanding and producing creative texts
GCSE English Language Unit 3: Understanding spoken and written texts and writing creatively

Associated Resources

• Moon on the Tides: Character & Voice PPTs
• Moon on the Tides: Place PPTs
• Moon on the...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. A Guide to Victorian Literature
2. Christina Rossetti
3. Thomas Hardy
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Cry of the Children

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,-
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. A Guide to Victorian Literature
2. Christina Rossetti
3. Thomas Hardy
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Extract from Songs

‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. A Guide to Victorian Literature
2. Christina Rossetti
3. Thomas Hardy
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Thomas Hardy 1840-1928

The Darkling Thrush 31 December, 1990

I leant upon a coppice gate
When frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. A Guide to Victorian Literature
2. Christina Rossetti
3. Thomas Hardy
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Christina Rossetti 1830-1894

A Christmas Carol

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

Assessment Objectives for Question One - Victorian Literature AS English Literature

It is essential that you bear these assessment objectives in mind when planning and writing your answer.

AO1 6%

Articulate creative, informed and relevant responses to literary texts using appropriate terminology and concepts, and coherent, accurate written...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

What To Expect In The Contextual Linking Question

On opening up your examination paper you will see a short extract related to Victorian Literature which will be NON-FICTION.

It could be any one of the following;

• A letter
• A work of criticism
• A diary extract
• A biographical extract
• An autobiographical extract
• A piece of cultural commentary
• A history...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

The following passages are non-fiction and though longer than the exam extract will be, they are similar to the type of extract you will meet in the exam.

• How do the writers express their thoughts and feelings in these extracts? Look closely and comment upon language, form and structure.
• Think of your wider reading. What could you use from your...

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

Extracts from Victorian Literature

Each extract in the list below is accompanied by a commentary.

• A Doll’s House [1879], Henrik Ibsen 1828-1906
• The Importance of Being Earnest [1895], Oscar Wilde 1854-1900

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

Examples from Victorian Literature

Each example in the list below is accompanied by a commentary.

• Christina Rossetti 1830-1894
  • A Christmas Carol
  • Song
  • Remember

• Thomas Hardy 1840-1928
  • The Darkling Thrush 21 December 1890

• Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • Songs

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • The Cry of the Children

Source: Work, Ford Madox Brown

1. Queen Victoria’s Reign
2. Prose
3. Poetry
4. Drama
5. Non-Fiction
6. Examination
7. Assessment Objectives, Exemplar & Contextual Linking

Extracts from Victorian Literature

Each extract in the list below is accompanied by a commentary.

• The Diary of a Nobody [1892], George and Weedon Grossmith
• Mary Barton [1848], Elizabeth Gaskell
• Wuthering Heights [1847], Emily Bronte 1818-1948
• David Copperfield [1850], Charles Dickens 1812-1870
• Great Expectations [1860/61], Charles Dickens 1812-1870
• ...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

Hopefully, this guide will have given you a starting point on how to prepare your students for this very difficult examination.

I cannot stress enough the importance of a focus upon the assessment objectives. If the pupils are aware constantly of how they are going to be assessed, they have the best chance of achieving a good mark.

With a few weeks to go before study leave, our lessons become exclusively about...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

OCR say that all of the six questions on this paper can be answered by any possible combination of the texts – and that they spend a long time ensuring this is so. I’m not sure I necessarily agree – there was a question on ‘women’ a few years ago that I would have been interested to see a response to it using Dr Faustus and Paradise Lost Book 1 – containing, as they do, no women . . .
Thus, I would suggest...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Symptoms of Love

Robert Graves 1895-1985

To end this wider reading resource, here is a poem by Robert Graves, more famously known for his First World War poetry, where love, romantic love in this case, is treated as an illness.

‘Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

Are omens and nightmares -
Listening...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The First Tooth

Mary Lamb 1764-1847

Sister:
Through the house what busy joy,
Just because the infant boy
Has a tiny tooth to show!
I have got a double row,
All as white and all as small;
Yet no one cares for mine at all.
He can say but half a word,
Yet that single sound’s preferred
To all the words that I can say
In the longest summer day.
He cannot walk, yet if he put
With mimic motion out his foot,
As if...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Deserter

Winifred M. Letts 1882-1972

There was a man, — don’t mind his name,
Whom Fear had dogged by night and day.
He could not face the German guns
And so he turned and ran away.
Just that - he turned and ran away,
But who can judge him, you or I ?
God makes a man of flesh and blood
Who yearns to live and not to die.
And this man when he feared to die
Was scared as any frightened child,
His knees were...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Soldier

Rupert Brooke 1887-1915

If I should die, think only this of me:
  That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
  Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Sonnet 130

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Shakespeare, in his numerous sonnets, has written about different types of love, and shows an original, somewhat subversive view of romantic love, devoid of the usual romantic comparisons. In fact in Sonnet 130 he mocks the conventional language of love. How does the language used show that he is mocking conventional notions of beauty? Consider also aspects of...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Mid-Term Break

Seamus Heaney 1939-

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Your Last Drive

Thomas Hardy

Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face—all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot
Where eight days later you were to lie,
And be spoken of as one who was not;
Beholding it with a cursory eye
As alien from...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Going

Thomas Hardy 1840-928

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
  Where I could not follow
  With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

  Never to bid good-bye,
  Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,...[ read full article ] »

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot 1888-1965
Extract from A Game of Chess

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out. Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Some Suggestions

Poetry

• John Donne 1572–1631 The Good Morrow, Song, Woman’s Constancy, The Sun Rising, The Flea, A Valediction - Forbidding Mourning
• George Herbert 1593-1633 Death, Redemption, Easter Wings
• Andrew Marvell 1621-678 The Definition of Love, To His Coy Mistress
• Richard Lovelace 1618-1657 To Althea from Prison - Song
• Sir John Suckling 1609-1642 Love’s Clock, The Constant Lover
• Wordsworth...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Daunting as the requirements of this examination might seem when you consider the range and scope of it, your success will largely depend upon how successfully you can analyse, compare and discuss unseen texts form the three major literary genres of poetry, drama and prose. You will also need to read as widely as you can and begin doing so as soon as possible, all the time making links and connections about...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

You will find below several extracts or entire pieces from plays, poetry and novels from different ages.  As you read and after you have read them all, try to make links between the texts as well as with other texts you have read and studied on the theme of love. To do well in your exam, you will need to use your wider reading in ways that will help inform your understanding of the unseen exam texts – and to...

1. Introduction
2. AQA Specific Section: Assessment Objectives, etc.
3. A Critical Vocabulary
4. Tips for Improving Exam Grades
5. Guide to Narrative: Narrative Frameworks
6. Guide to Narrative: Narrative Concepts
7. Focalisation and Diegesis
8. Mimesis
9. Narrative Forms and Structures
10. AQA Specific Exam Tips
11. Help with Exam Revision
12. Analysis of Cousin Kate, poem by Christina Rossetti

Cousin Kate

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I was a cottage maiden [1]
Hardened by sun and air,
Contented with my cottage...

The following guide would be useful for AQA LITB1, Aspects of Narrative but also for many other A level (and GCSE) units, where Hardy’s poems might be studied.

• Neutral Tones
• The Darkling Thrush
• ­At Castle Boterel
• ­The Voice
• ­Drummer Hodge
• ­In Church
• ­The Oxen

To many, Hardy is a genius, worthy of the highest respect as a technician in his poetry: a poet able to move his readers deeply often by his portrayal of ordinary people and events, both rendered special by the manner of his telling; to others, his technical ability is never...

Associated Resources

• Blake - Innocent Sweep.ppt
• Blake - Experience Sweep.ppt
• Blake - Holy Thursday.ppt

Introducing William Blake

Abstract

The course discussed in these notes is designed as a short course of enrichment and development of skills of poetry analysis based in a personal response to pairs of poems from the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

It is not designed to cover too many of the poems, but rather to spark interest and enthusiasm.

It can be used as part of a cross-curricular activity and benefits from a high level of...

Context

This poem was written in 1938, just before Yeats’ death.

Structure

The poem is written as a conversation between the man and an echo. It is composed of rhyming couplets which is the simplest rhyme form.

Stanza 1

The word ‘Alt’ is a rocky fissure at Knocknarea, County Sligo. The phrase ‘broad noon has never lit’ suggests a dark, secluded place.  This is an alliterative phrase ‘shout a secret to the stone’ ; ‘shout’ suggests a public declaration but by shouting at ‘the stone’ the man keeps his secret while making...

Context

This poem was written in 1927. The people mentioned in the title are Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) and Constance Markiewicz (nee Gore-Booth) (1868-1927). They were childhood friends of Yeats.

Structure

The poem has 3 stanzas with 10 or 12 lines. There is no regular rhyme scheme in the poem which may reflect the fact that Yeats is writing about friends; this is a personal poem and not the place for the formal or structured.

Stanza 1

‘Lissadell’ is a late Georgian house, home of the Gore-Booths, in County Sligo. The description...

Context

This poem was written after a visit by Yeats in his capacity as a Senator to St Otteran’s School, Waterford in 1926. The school was run on Montessori principles.

Structure

The poem is 8 stanzas long with 8 lines per stanza. It is also written in ottava rima, a verse form Yeats used in Sailing to Byzantium. The subject matter is appropriate for this verse form – the changing face of man and mortality.

Stanza 1

Yeats walks through the school in the company of Mother Philomena who ran the school. He lists the children’s activities...

Context

This poem can be seen in reference to The Second Coming; it describes a moment that represented a change of era in Yeats’ model of gyres. But where Yeats’ poem The Second Coming represents the end of modern history, Leda and the Swan represents something like its beginning; the rape of Leda by Zeus resulted in the birth/hatching of Clytemnestra, Helen, Castro and Polydeuces (Castor and Polydeuces were war gods) and this brought about the Trojan War which in turn brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of...

Context

This poem was written in 1926 and first published in 1928. Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast:

I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called Sailing to Byzantium. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled ‘croziers’ in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the...

Context

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War. Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late. Early drafts also included such lines as: “And there’s no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt,” and “The good are wavering, while the worst prevail.” (Wikipedia)

Yeats intended The Second Coming to describe the current historical moment –...

Context

This poem was written as a reaction to the Easter Rising of 23-29 April 1916.

It was written in September 1916 when Yeats was staying with Maud Gonne MacBride at Les Mouettes, Calvados. In it he records his reactions to the Easter Rising in Dublin, when the city centre was occupied by a force of around 700 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by Patrick Pearse, and members of the Citizen Army, led by James Connolly. They held out for 6 days – 15 of their leaders were sentenced by courts martial and executed between 3rd...

Context

This poem was first published in 1916. The Fisherman is presented as the ‘ideal man’ with his country skills; he is also a symbol for Ireland – where Yeats believes the ideal man ‘exists’. It draws a contrast between Yeats’ ‘ideal Irishman’ and the real man of his contemporary Ireland. Yeats was a skilled fly fisherman and used this knowledge to develop the character of the fisherman.

Structure

The poem is written as a single stanza with a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, 3 stresses per line.

The word ‘him’ refers to...