click on image to enlargeIntroduction
When you begin teaching the Cambridge IGCSE English Literature, you have a choice as to which texts your students will study in order to complete the poetry part of the examination. You can choose to teach a selection of poems by Thomas Hardy:
- Neutral Tones
- ‘I Look into My Glass’
- Drummer Hodge
- The Darkling Thrush
- On the Departure Platform
- The Pine Planters
- The Convergence of the Twain
- The Going
- The Voice
- At the Word ‘Farewell’
- During Wind and Rain
- In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
- No Buyers: A Street Scene
- Nobody Comes
On the other hand, you can make use of the Songs of Ourselves anthology:
- Sujata Bhatt, ‘A Different History’
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’
- Allen Curnow, ‘Continuum’
- Edwin Muir, ‘Horses’
- Judith Wright, ‘Hunting Snake’
- Ted Hughes, ‘Pike’
- Christina Rossetti, ‘A Birthday’
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Woodspurge’
- Kevin Halligan, ‘The Cockroach’
- Margaret Atwood, ‘The City Planners’
- Boey Kim Cheng, ‘The Planners’
- Norman MacCaig, ‘Summer Farm’
- Elizabeth Brewster, ‘Where I Come From’
- William Wordsworth, ‘Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’
Having taught this course for several years, in a couple of different schools, I’ve followed both options and my honest advice would be that there’s a little more coherence in teaching 14 poems by one writer, rather than 14 by different poets. However, I think that very much comes down to your view of Thomas Hardy . . . When the poet choice was Tennyson, I was quite happy to use Songs of Ourselves, however, I’ve always had a soft spot for Hardy. I was taught him myself when I took A Level – it’s funny how the authors come and go from fashion!
What I am going to try to do in this guide is offer you some initial ideas as to how to approach these poems – with some revision videos and some exemplar student responses included – to show you that actually there’s...
