Poetry

Poetry

1. A Poison Tree

   • Themes
     • Anger - effects of wrath, extreme anger, one of 7 deadly sins
       • Wrath towards foe = unspoken and unresolved
     • Communication
       • Clear difference friend vs foe
       • Lack of communication with foe leads anger to build and grow
       • Moral message - we shouldn't let anger grow
   • Techniques
     • Repetition - "my wrath" repeated 3 times in opening stanza - all encompassing nature of anger
     • Rhyme - "friend/end", "fears/tears" - simple rhyme scheme lends innocence to poem
     • Monosyllables - "wrath", "tree", "shine" - words of 1 syllable = simplicity to poem - unresolved anger destroys innocence

2. The Destruction of Sennacherib

   • Techniques
     • Anapaestic metre - two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable - deceptively innocent metre contrasts with destruction conveyed
     • End-stopped - adding to sense of rolling advancement
     • Sibilance - runs through poem, reflecting sounds of sea, leaves and breath of Angel of Death
   • Themes
     • Destruction and death
       • Key theme vividly presented in images of poem
       • Men destroyed in the war were "gleaming"
         • "And their heart but once heaved and for ever grew still!"
     • Power of God
       • Bible as story basis for poem
       • God of Israel called onto protect city of Jerusalem
       • Exerts power by sending 'Angel of Death ' to destroy the army
     • Power of humans
       • Insignificant & insubstantial
       • Armies can adorn themselves with 'purple and gold' but in the 'glance of the Lord' all this becomes useless

3. Extract from The Prelude

   • Techniques
     • Blank verse - written in unrhymed iambic pentameter
     • Alliteration - "And measured motion like a living thing" - repetition of initial sounds emphasises slow and steady (though imagined) movement
     • Imagery - "small circles glittering idly in the moon" - safe image, gives the lake a magical feel
     • "A huge peak.../Upreared its head" - mountain is personified, or given human characteristics - makes it seem more terrifying
   • Themes
     • Power of Nature
       • Overwhelmed by scale
       • Becomes aware of this when he is out on a lake at night in a boat
       • Vision of a huge mountain leaves him in a depression
     • Insignificance of the individual
       • Speaker made aware of his own insignificance
       • Conflict of scale between the human experience & the incomprehensible size of nature
       • Speaker#s pride in his skill at rowing seems meaningless compared to the "huge peak" on the horizon
     • Fear
       • Mountain seems to move in on the speaker, imposing its power on the man in his boat
       • Rows as quickly as he can away from the mountain, "trembling" and in "grave and serious mood".
         • "like a living thing,/Strode after me"

4. The Man He Killed

   • Techniques
     • All in speech marks
       • Separates speaker from poet
       • Poet overhears in bar
     • Dramatic monologue - speaker speaking directly to audience
     • Dialect
       • Makes speaker seem ordinary & working class
   • Themes
     • Futility of war
       • War is devastating and futile
       • Man he killed was like himself
         • Both out of work so enlisted
       • Little sense of fighting
         • Both fighting for cause they don't have any understanding of
       • Another life: bar
     • The effects of war on the individual
       • Speaker: a "returned soldier"
       • Signs of distress in justifying of actions
       • Struggling with words
       • Unsure why he had to kill the man
     • Social class
       • Working class: simple language
       • Bossed around by higher classes
       • Little other choice than to join army

5. Cousin Kate

   • Tecnniques
     • Ballad - traditional poetic form, used to tell a story. POem tells the story of the cottage-maiden's love affair
     • Simile - "He changed me like a glove" - shows how easily the lord discarded her
     • Kate only named person in the poem - shows she doesn't have resentment for the lord, just Kate
     • Personal pronouns - "You grow more fair than I" - Speaker addresses her cousin, Kate & makes comparisons between their circumstances
     • Assonance - "Woe", "moan", "howl", "bound" - repetition of "o" sound throughout poem echoes the speaker's pain and sorrow
   • Themes
     • Social status & power - we see stark differences in social status in this poem bwterrn the farm workers whose skin is "hardened by sun and air" & the nobility - "great lord" uses speaker carelessly and then discards her when he's done. She's powerless to object & jealous of her cousin who supplants her. However,speaker reveals that she does have power in the end - she is the mother to the lord's son.
       • "Your sire would give broad lands for one/to wear his coronet
       • Vw class game: rather than one class vs another, it's the lord against her
       • Vs Catrin - both named, one love, one hate, both have physical actions described
     • Cottage maiden = jealous of Cousin Kate. She claims to have more right to be with the lord & complains her "love was true" whilst her cousin's was "writ in sand". She compares the way she is called "an outcast thing" by her neighbours (we later suspect this is because of bastard child) whilst Kate is called "good and pure". - "If you stood where I stand"

6. Half Caste

   • Techniques
     • Phonetic spelling: "wha yu mean?" - reflects his accent
       • "Ah rass" - Caribbean expression
     • Free verse - has no form or structure
     • Standard English and dialect - demonstrates point of artists using apparent opposites in their work - showing that it isn't a half-cast poem
     • Short lines - half lines - half-caste
   • Themes
     • Binary opposition - we understand a word in relation to its opposite
       • Light in its difference to shadow
       • People who use term 'half-caste' somehow imply mixed race people are of less worth - poet ridicules this position and shows how a person can't be any less whole
         • "I half-caste human being/cast half a shadow"
     • Prejudice & racism - speaker experiences conflict about way he is received in England & objects to term "half-caste" - conflict is between speaker & racism he faces - accuses people of only using half their mind when they use terms like "half-caste"
       • "Come back tomorrow/wid de whole of yu eye/an de whole of yu ear/an de whole of yu mind"

7. Exposure

   • Techniques
     • Pronouns - use of pronouns "us" and "our" creates a choral voice for the soldiers that also includes the poet and the reader, engaging them
     • Refrain - "But nothing happens" - shorter line, like refrain, at end of each stanza - expresses the desperation of the soldiers
     • Red - connotations of blood and suffering
     • Rhetorical question - "What are we doing here?"
     • Alliteration - "sag stormy"
     • Claustrophobia - surrounded and enclosed by danger
   • Themes
     • Horrors of war
       • Awful conditions of the trenches
     • Death - hangs over the soldiers - risk of death from exposure - wait arrival of burying party
     • Power of nature - powerless in face of the winter storms - weather more dangerous than the enemy - "Bullets streak the silence. Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow"

8. The Charge of the Light Brigade

   • Techniques
     • Ballad - regular rhyme & rhythm make poem easy to remember
     • Repetition - 'Half a league, half a league' - emphasises desperation and desperate position
     • Exclamations - "Noble six hundred!" ! = commands of officers & speakers insistence we honour the light brigade
   • Themes
     • Horrors of war
       • Futile waste of life - mistakenly sent on essentially suicide mission
       • More than 150 men lost their lives
     • Honour
       • Soldiers followed orders and rode in - courageous, deserve to be honoured
       • "horse and hero fell/That they had fought so well"
     • Power & obedience
       • Power of the army shown through order from officer obeyed by 600 men - soldiers trained to follow orders - abuse of power

9. Catrin

   • Techniques
     • Alliteration - "w" - "all over the walls with my/Words" "We want, we shouted" -"w" to womb & first wails
     • Metaphor - "The right/Red rope of love" - image of rope represents the umbilical cord that feeds baby in the womb and is cut at birth. Also stands for invisible ties that remain between mother & daughter as girl grows up
   • Themes
     • Mother & daughter relationship" - explores ties that bond other & daughter. Autobiographical poem but universal relationship
     • Separation - both mother & daughter fighting to be separate - joined by cord in room, struggle through birth to "become/Separate" - enjambment shows separation
       • Desire to be separate showsn through two separate stanzas
     • Independence - second stanza = Catrin as teenager, quietly challenging mother's authority - typical scenario = girl asks to be allowed to stay out 'for one more hour'. 'dark' suggests the feats that the mother has for her daughter as she steps towards her independence. "As you ask may you skate/In the dark, for one more hour'

10. Poppies

    • Techniques
      • Military semantic field
        • "Disrupting a blockade/of yellow bias binding"
          • Language of warfare applied to everyday actions & items
        • Metaphor
          • I went into your bedroom,/released a song bird from its cage
            • Bird represents way the mother has let her son go free, even if it is into potential danger - could also represent her coming to terms with her son's death
    • Themes
      • Impact of war on individuals
        • Poem shows how war affects those at home as well as the soldiers directly involved
        • Mother lets her son go and ultimately he dies in conflict (although this is not explicitly stated)
          • "I traced/the inscriptions on the war memorial
      • Separation & loss
        • Mother grieving for her son though attempting to be brave
        • Mournful & sad
        • Innocent images of boy & mother emphasise the sense of loss
        • I wanted to graze my nose/across the tip of your nose
      • Remembrance
        • Title of poem relates to remembrance with the symbol of poppies.
        • "Armistice Sunday" is referred to in the opening line and this is a day for remembering those who have died in the war.
          • Speaker remembers details of her son's life throughout the poem.
        • "I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals/spasms of paper red"
      • Deals with death differently to 'A Poison Tree' - APT did not feel as much grief because they were foes but this is a MOTHER and her SON

11. Belfast Confetti

    • Techniques
      • Enjambment
        • It was raining/exclamation marks
        • Disjointed feel, suggests sound of explosion and gunfire
      • Lists
        • Compares explosion to words
      • Structure and line length reflects the chaos and unpredictability
      • Enjambment shows stream of conscience and the hectickness of war
    • Themes
      • Futility of war
        • Listing of streets
      • Impact of conflict on individuals
        • Conflict = destabilising effect on speaker
        • Panic = loss of control of langyage
        • Fear forces down streets he knows well
        • Rhetorical questions at end from police officer: could be literal or could have wider meaning
      • Destruction
        • Bomb destroys everything around: peace, state of mind of indiciduals
        • Bomb does more damage than immediate physical damage - wide reaching. Shown through break down of language.
        • "I was trying to complete a sentence in my head but it kept/stuttering

12. The Class Game

    • Techniques
      • Perfect rhyme - "Way/day", "toil/oil", "nelly/belly"
        • Monosyllabic & simple - representing unsophisticated attitude
      • Colloquial language
        • "Oily", "corpy", "wet nelly" - used in spoken language by speakers from a particular region * background (in this case working Liverpool
      • Agressive & accusative through use of "you"
    • Themes
      • Clashes of social class - conflict with upper social classes who she thinks look down on her - ironically speaker seems just as concerned with social class as the "you" she addresses - "Why do you care what class I'm from?"
      • Identity - speaker claims at end "proud of the class that I come from" -. Final lines at the end of poem state clearly how language differences define her social class
      • Lanhuahe - comparisons made between different classes - lives "in a corpy" rather than "a pretty little semi" and wears "second hand clothes" and her "hands are stained with toil". Uses colloquial language to shock the reader and highlight these differences.
        • "Say toilet instead of bog when I want to pee"

13. War Photographer

    • Techniques
      • Parallelism"-As when at Ascot once" "-as last week" - structure of line 9 is paralleled in line 13, highlighting the contrast between the situations
      • Ellipsis - "began to run..." - this line is unfinished and the ellipsis leads us to fear the worst for the girl
      • Alliteration - "A pair of peach, sun-gilded girls" - repetition of "p" and "g" in this line lends a pleasing balance, emphasising the ease of the girls lives
    • Themes
      • Effect of conflict on civilians - girl in second half of poem evokes sympathy from reader. "Small" and staggers down the free, holding a baby until "the first bomb of the morning" shocks her. Image of girl dropping baby and running in fear is a distressing example of the effects of warfare on innocent civilian lives.
      • Injustice - shown through juxtaposition - girls drunk on champagne and "giggling" at Ascot and then aimage of "small girl" with "her burden" - create sense of injustice. Unjust that life is experienced in such dramatically different ways. Speaker deems it "arbitrary" as to which version of reality each individual experiences
      • Conflict between appearance & reality
        • Newspaper showed picture of "little mother" moments before bomb dropped" - used her "almost-smile" as evidence that the "human spirit triumphs over all".
          • Manipulation of the images presents a conflict between reality and the mediated versions that we are presented with.

14. No Problem

    • Techniques
      • Phonetic spelling - mimic Jamaican accent & highlight family background
      • Rhyme: 'Brunt/stunts', 'smile/versatile' 0 simple rhyme scheme in which every other line rhymes
      • First person - 'I am versatile' - creates strong sense of speaker. Individual is important in No Problem - 8 lines beginning 'I'
      • Title suggests no problem with white people - he's simply observing stereotypes placed upon black people
    • Themes
      • Identity
        • Personal pronoun 'I' in 1st stanza - it's a personal pronoun
          • "Black is not de problem" in second stanza - his story could be similar to other people's
            • Stereotyping and racism reaches beyond the speaker
      • Prejudice
        • He does nothing wrong, yet he has to "bear de brunt/Of silly playground taunts"
        • Thinks of himself as 'academic' but is 'branded athletic'

15. What Were They Like?

    • Techniques
      • Past tense - What WERE They Like
        • Something happened to change the people
      • Metaphor - no more buds - buds represent new life, beauty & hope
      • Alliteration - 'Stepped surely along the terraces' - 's' sound repeated, lending careful, measured tone
    • Theme
      • Hopelessness
        • Tragic loss in poem
        • Too late to be asking questions about culture
        • War destroyed so much
        • Sense of hopelessness in final line: "What can say?" - none of beauty of the culture remains to be witnessed
      • Destruction
        • Images of culture that has been destroyed
        • Truth of 'people of Viet Nam lost"
        • Culture, literature, art destroyed
        • "Killed", "charred", "smashed"