Unseen Poetry

Lesson 1Task 1 – The following phrases are about poetry. Tick the phrases you agree with, cross the ones you don’t. At the bottom, there is space to add your own comment about your opinions of poetry.

I do not mind what you say – it might be that you hate poems but that’s ok…

Task 2 – Read and make notes of the following about the exam:

There will always be a sentence before the question that tells you what the poems are about – PAY ATTENTION TO IT!

Look at the number of marks available and split your time as appropriate!

Task 3 – Understanding the differences between AO1, AO2 and AO3.

Poem One - Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare   As any she belied with false compare.

Poem Two - Havisham

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since thenI haven't wished him dead, Prayed for itso hard I've dark green pebbles for eyes, ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with. Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole daysin bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dressyellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.Some nights better, the lost body over me,my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love's hate behind a white veil; a red balloon burstingin my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.

Your task is to define what you will have to do or look at in each bullet point.

When you have done that, read the two poems you have been given and fill out your table, writing a PEE paragraph for poem 1 on the left and a PEE paragraph for poem 2 on the right under each bullet point.

Then read through your whole response.

Poem 1: Sonnet 130 Poem 2: HavishamAO1 - Respond to texts critically and imaginatively; select and evaluate relevant textual detail to illustrate and support interpretations. What do you have to do for this bullet point?

PEE 1: PEE 2:

AO2 - Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.What do you have to do for this bullet point?

PEE 1: PEE 2:

AO3 - Make comparisons and explain links between texts, evaluating writers’ different ways of expressing meaning and achieving effects.What do you have to do for this bullet point?

PEE 1: PEE 2:

Lesson 2

Unseen Poetry – Content

Task 1 – Starter

Match up the poem’s title with its first line and last line.

Title First Line/Phrase Last Line/PhraseBlessing Chaos ruled OK in the classroom This school is great – I love it!

Grandfather I rememberHis sparse white hair and lean face;

The fog unfolds its bitter scent

Impressions of a New Boy I went to school a day too soon She was Eliza once again

Names She was Eliza for a few weeks Quieter than snow

November Night, Edinburgh The clouds have given their all - Noplace for him in our heaven,there it’s clean and empty.

Quieter Than Snow The night tinkles like ice in glasses like a pair of wings settling after flight

The Lesson The skin cracks like a pod. As the blessing singsover their small bones.

Tramp This mad prophetgibbers mid-traffic

And wilting daffodilsLaid upon his grave

Winter Swans This school is huge – I hate it! “Now let that be a lesson” he said.

Task 2:

Mid Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay,Counting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours 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 pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble.'Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year. 

Seamus Heaney

Paragraph 1: Content Paragraph 2: Theme

Task 3:

Task 4:

Task 5:

Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Lesson 3

Unseen Poetry – The Ideas

Learning Objectives:

To tackle the second bullet point of the poetry question; to understand how poets present ideas in their poems.

Learning Outcomes:

C+/B-: be able to identify the major themes/messages/purposes in the poems and use quotes to explain how they have been presented

B+/A-: probe the poem, looking for deeper meanings or themes/messages/purposes, choosing key quotes to explain this

A+/A*: explore why a poet presents this theme/messages/purposes to a reader and in what way

Task 1:

Task 2:

Task 3:

Nothing’s Changed

Small round hard stones click under my heels, seeding grasses thrust bearded seeds into trouser cuffs, cans, trodden on, crunch in tall, purple-flowering, amiable weeds.

District Six. No board says it is: but my feet know, and my hands, and the skin about my bones, and the soft labouring of my lungs, and the hot, white, inwards turning anger of my eyes.

Brash with glass, name flaring like a flag, it squats in the grass and weeds, incipient Port Jackson trees: new, up-market, haute cuisine, guard at the gatepost, whites only inn.

No sign says it is: but we know where we belong.

I press my nose to the clear panes, know, before I see them, there will be crushed ice white glass, linen falls, the single rose.

Down the road, working man's cafe sells bunny chows. Take it with you, eat it at a plastic table's top, wipe your fingers on your jeans, spit a little on the floor: it's in the bone.

I back from the glass, boy again, leaving small mean O of small mean mouth. Hands burn for a stone, a bomb, to shiver down the glass. Nothing's changed.

Task 4: Introducing Comparison

Look now at the contextual information in the blue box below and read the poem on the next page.

Bullet point the same way you did for the first poem.

Then piece your second set of bullet points together to create a paragraph “the ideas the poets may have wanted us to think about”.

Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes

At the stoplight waiting for the light

nine am downtown San Francisco a bright yellow garbage truck with two garbagemen in red plastic blazers standing on the back stoop one on each side hanging on and looking down into an elegant open Mercedes with an elegant couple in it The man in a hip three-piece linen suit with shoulder-length blond hair & sunglasses The young blond woman so casually coifed with a short skirt and colored stockings on the way to his architect's office And the two scavengers up since four am grungy from their route on the way home The older of the two with grey iron hair and hunched back looking down like some gargoyle Quasimodo And the younger of the two also with sunglasses & long hair about the same age as the Mercedes driver And both scavengers gazing down as from a great distance at the cool couple as if they were watching some odorless TV ad in which everything is always possible And the very red light for an instant holding all four close together as if anything at all were possible between them across that small gulf in the high seas of this democracy

Lesson 4

Unseen Poetry – Mood & Atmosphere Learning Objectives:

To tackle the third bullet point of the poetry question; to understand how mood and atmosphere is created in poetry

Learning Outcomes:

C+/B-: identify the mood of a poem by selecting and explaining important words and phrases

B+/A-: analyse the impact of the mood on the poem and reader, using key words and phrases in analysis

A+/A*: evaluate how and why a poet manipulates the mood of a poem and to what effect, comparing by selecting key words and phrases

Task 1:

Task 2:

Read through the poem, then write one paragraph about what the content of the poem is, as well as any themes/ideas you may have come up with.

Hurricane Hits England – Grace Nichols

It took a hurricane, to bring her closerTo the landscapeHalf the night she lay awake,The howling ship of the windIts gathering rage,Like some dark ancestral spectre,Fearful and reassuring:

Talk to me HuracanTalk to me OyaTalk to me ShangoAnd Hattie,My sweeping, back-home cousin.

Tell me why you visit.An English coast?What is the meaningOf old tonguesReaping havocIn new places?

The blinding illumination,Even as you short-Circuit usInto further darkness?

What is the meaning of treesFalling heavy as whalesTheir crusted rootsTheir cratered graves?

O Why is my heart unchained?

Tropical Oya of the Weather,I am aligning myself to you,I am following the movement of your winds,I am riding the mystery of your storm.

Ah, sweet mystery;Come to break the frozen lake in me,Shaking the foundations of the very trees within me,That the earth is the earth is the earth.

Task 3:

Now turn these ideas into two PEE/PETE paragraphs. An examples is below:

Task 4:

Hurricane 

Under low black cloudsthe wind was allspeedy feet, all horns and breathsall bangs, howls, rattles,in every hen house,church hall and school. Roaring, screaming, returning,it made forced entry, shoved walls,made rifts, brought roofs down,hitting rooms to sticks apart. It wrung soft banana trees,broke tough trunks of palms,It pounded vines of yams,left fields battered up.

Invisible with such ecstasy-With no intervention of sun or man-Everywhere kept changing branches. Zinc sheets are kites.Leaves are panic swarms.Fowls are fixed with feathers turned,Goats, dogs. pigs,All are people together. Then growling it slunk awayFrom muddy, mossy trail and boatsIn hedges: and cows, rats, bats, trees,Fish, all dead in the road.

Task 5:

Write 3 paragraphs comparing the moods and atmospheres in the poems you have studied.

Lesson 5

Unseen Poetry – Putting it all Together

Task 1: Read the bullet point and cover the final column. Fill in the middle column about what YOU think the bullet wants you to talk about and check your answers against the answers in the column ‘It actually means…’

Task 2: Read the following poem and responses below.

Woman Work

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I’ve got the shirts to press

The tots to dress

The cane to be cut

I gotta clean up this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

‘Til I can rest again

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own.

“The poet suggests that she wants to leave her life full of chores as she says ‘Storm, blow me from here With your fiercest wind.’ This shows that she is tired of her life and wishes to escape the constant drudgery of chores. The word ‘fiercest’ suggests force and hints that she wants to be as far removed as possible.

The poet suggests she wants a holiday as she says ‘shine on me, sunshine.’ This suggests she gets no time to herself. The word ‘sunshine’ suggests happiness and suggests she would be grateful for a holiday. The comma allows for a pause and could be symbolising that the idea of a holiday allows her to relax and escape from her daily grind.”

Task 3:

I want you to have a go at doing what I have just shown you on the second poem ‘Overheard in County Sligo.’ You need to write a couple of paragraphs conveying the ideas and content of the poem.

Remember, when you do this in the exam you will need to compare the two poems together. What are their similarities and differences?

Overheard in County Sligo

I married a man from County Roscommonand I live in the back of beyondwith a field of cows and a yard of hensand six white geese on the pond.

At my door’s a square of yellow corncaught up by its corners and shaken,and the road runs down through the open gateand freedom’s there for the taking.

I had thought to work on the Abbey stageor have my name in a book,to see my thought on the printed page,or still the crowd with a look.

But I turn to fold the breakfast clothand to polish the lustre and brass,to order and dust the tumbled roomsand find my face in the glass.

I ought to feel I’m a happy womanfor I lie in the lap of the land,but I married the man from County Roscommonand I live at the back of beyond.

Gillian Clarke

Write two comparison paragraphs. The two example paragraphs below can help you.