Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English asks you to study texts across the three genres of Poetry, Prose and Drama. Often it is poetry which learners worry about most. With prose and drama, there is a clear story, and narrative content to learn. Poetry is more abstract, requiring the reader to interpret a text in the same way as they might an artwork in a museum.
Consider this painting by Albrecht Dürer. You need to know the horsemen are an allegory, which means they are personifications or images rather than people.
The print was made at the end of the sixteenth century, in a period of increasing war and religious turmoil in Europe, and is based on a Biblical prophecy of how the world will end. Poetry works in a similar way: it gives us an image which is not realistic but needs to be interpreted.
When writing about poems for this examination, the assessment will be based around four objectives: knowledge, understanding, language and personal response.
What you need to know about a poem is often misunderstood.
Some think it is important to know a lot about the poet’s life before writing about the poems.
But assessment objective 1 is not about that kind of knowledge. It is about demonstrating a knowledge of the poem’s content through reference to specific sections of the text.
For now, we need only concern ourselves with the poem, not the poet.
As an example, let’s look at ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ by Emily Dickinson.
The poem is an allegory. All those capital letters throughout the text indicate this. Lots of poems have a central, extended metaphor or idea. It is important to understand this right away.
The other character in the poem is ‘I’. Poems have a voice, but that speaker is not necessarily the poet her or himself.
Death stops and takes the speaker on a carriage ride, so we already know that the poem will describe a journey. By making textual references we can show the different stages of that journey.
We might want to think about the speaker’s relationship with Death:
his kindness and civility;
her light, fashionable clothes,
or the fact that ‘The Carriage held but just Ourselves’.
A good dictionary will help you understand key words and phrases in the text.
We could also consider the way the poem explores the passage of time. Although the journey is apparently a slow one, time seems to go fast in this stanza, which may be the point, as a life seems to just flash past.
From youthful images of childish games in school, to the idea of grain waiting to be harvested at the end of the summer, to the end of the day: all these images suggest the passage of time.
As we read through the poem for the first time, questions may arise that cannot easily be answered. Make a note of such questions and carry on. In AO1, the key is to figure out WHAT is going on in terms of content, structure and word choice, and not so much HOW or WHY.
We need a clear set of images in our head before trying too hard to interpret them.
Poetry AO1 video transcript
Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English asks you to study texts across the three genres of Poetry, Prose and Drama. Often it is poetry which learners worry about most. With prose and drama, there is a clear story, and narrative content to learn. Poetry is more abstract, requiring the reader to interpret a text in the same way as they might an artwork in a museum.