Topic outline
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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.
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.
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Poetry AO2 video transcript
Assessment objective 2 is about contexts. Plural not singular. There is no single meaning or context which is the correct one.
It is important when addressing AO2 to go beyond surface meaning and story, and to look at underlying ideas and attitudes. Not just the poet’s, but our own.
A second reading leads us to ask ‘Why?’ rather than ‘What?’ and these questions might have more than one answer.
Why does he open the door of the carriage so ‘kindly’? Is this sarcastic?
Why won’t the speaker ‘stop for Death’? Is she in too much of a hurry to get on with her life?
Is ‘Eternity’ the grave? Or is it a suggestion that Death is not the end of the journey, and that there is life beyond the grave?
Dickinson’s beliefs, like those of many poets, were religious but not orthodox. In other words, she is asking us to think rather than giving us answers.
A lot of the meaning of this poem is a matter of tone, and whether we read lines literally or with irony (that idea that lines can mean two different things at the same time).
Another context to bring in at this point is the role of women at the time the poem was written.
Given the limitations of education for women at the time, how well equipped were they to answer big philosophical questions about life?
Dickinson herself was highly educated and an independent thinker, so the deeper awareness of ideas and attitudes would confront these larger questions about life and death – or mortality.
In nineteenth-century Puritan America. Such free thinking was unusual, especially for women. Dickinson’s poems were unknown and unpublished in her own time, but mean more to us today.
Once you have explored the deeper meanings of a text, you can begin to form your own personal response.
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Poetry AO3 video transcript
Assessment objective 3 requires learners to ‘recognise and appreciate ways in which writers use language, structure and form to create and shape meanings and effects’. Note the word ‘appreciate’, which implies critical engagement and evaluation of how the text works.
AO3 does not ask you to look at language, structure and form in isolation. It is the commentary on how language contributes to ‘meanings and effects’ which counts here.
How does the poet’s use of language, structure and form lead us towards particular thoughts or feelings?
‘Meanings and effects’ suggests that there is more than one meaning for a text, and the language, structure and form of the poem make that meaning.
The word ‘effects’ does not just mean listing the literary effects which writers use. ‘Effects’ implies that words have an effect on the reader, so AO3 is closely related to AO4 (personal response).
Let’s look at ‘The Caged Skylark’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins as an example.
The title tells you this poem is about a caged songbird, but this is not to be understood literally. You can’t put a skylark in a cage, so this is a metaphor, or possibly an allegory, for something which is trapped and should be free.
This poem needs to be heard as well as read, as it depends just as much on its music - its various sound effects - as its images or pictures.
There are a couple of things to notice.
Firstly, the poem is 14 lines long, so it is a sonnet, and is divided into eight lines - the octave - and six lines - the sestet.
Secondly, there is rhyme. Only four rhymes which reinforce that division into octave and sestet, and make it clear that the poem changes direction after line eight.
There is a lot of alliteration. Often more than one word in the same line begins with the same letter and so has a similar sound.
When you pay attention to rhymes, sound effects, line endings and the stress of the poem, you have its rhythm.
As in most poems, rhythm is an important part of the effect, which is why it needs to be heard and read aloud.
It is usually a good idea to consider the structure and patterns of a poem before writing about its language. You need to appreciate this before considering the details of the poem.
How does language ‘create and shape’ a powerful opening here?
Notice the contrast between ‘dare-gale’ which sounds so exciting and ‘dull cage’. How does the alliteration reinforce that?
What about ‘skylark scanted’? What does that suggest has happened to the bird if we imagine it caged? The word ‘scanted’ suggests something is missing. Notice the difference in rhythm between the first half of the line, and the bare monosyllables at the end.
And what about the word ‘as’? It suggests the whole line is a simile, so we need to look out for a comparison.
This tells us the skylark resembles the human spirit.
If the human spirit is the skylark, the ‘bone-house’ is the ‘dull cage’.
Here is another contrast, sometimes called a juxtaposition.
The spirit is ‘mounting’, so like the bird it wants to climb and soar.
A bone-house sounds like a tomb, and a ‘mean house’ like a slum, but in contrast to the spirit, here the poet must be describing the body.
Think about the effect of talking about the body in this way.
Does it remind us of our own mortality?
And what are the things about having a body which can make the spirit mean?
In Hopkins’ poetry, it isn’t just imagery which makes an impact on the reader.
He also uses rhythm, based on what we call ‘stress’. In particular, Hopkins used a technique called ‘sprung rhythm’. Instead of the iambic rhythms familiar from English poetry such as Shakespeare’s plays, he would put strong stresses together.
‘This in drudgery, day- labouring-out life’s age’
When you say this line, you stress the syllables in bold. Notice how the line begins iambic, alternating weak and strong stresses, and he then puts strong stresses next to each other, by using long vowel sounds (‘a’ and ‘i’) which you have to put an emphasis on. Notice the stress on ‘day labour’ and ‘life’s age’.
Think about what this makes you feel about everyday human life, trapped in the material body instead of in the freedom of the spirit.
It provides further illustration of that comparison to a songbird trapped in a cage, and shows how we can sometimes feel trapped in our everyday lives.
In ‘The Caged Skylark’, Hopkins is clearly not just writing about a bird, but about human feelings. He describes a spirit which feels trapped in the material world, and the human body, and wants to be free to express itself and find its own ‘wild nest’.
A very strict verse form – the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet originally used for love poetry – may be an appropriate way to express a feeling of being trapped. But look at how Hopkins tries to escape from tight forms by breaking the rules, using alliteration and sprung rhythm, and notice the enjambment (run-on lines) in the final lines and the lack of punctuation.
There is a clear change of mood, as well as rhyme in the sestet. This is called a volta or turn, and it is stressed by repeated negation: ‘not’, ‘no rest’, ‘no prison’, ‘not distressed’, ‘nor he’.
Finally ‘risen’ is rhymed with ‘no prison’ to suggest an alternative to the images of being trapped or caged yet longing to sing.
Freedom and a ‘risen’ spirit are strongly linked. The allusions are to nature as well as religion to suggest a spiritual alternative for you, as the reader, to interpret to fit your emotions and beliefs.
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Poetry AO4 video transcript
To explore assessment objective 4 – ‘Personal Response’ - we will be looking at Tennyson’s poem ‘Song: Tears, Idle Tears’
Tennyson himself tells us that this poem came to him one Autumn on a visit to Tintern Abbey.
Personal response is not just about your own memories or experiences. Even if you had been to Tintern Abbey, it would not influence your critical reaction to Tenyson’s poem.
AO4 communicate a sensitive and informed personal response.
‘Communicate’ suggests that a personal response involves writing as well as reading skills. You need to shape your writing in a way which communicates your sensitive engagement with the text.
AO4 asks for your appreciation and evaluation of the poem.
This requires at least two readings. An initial overview identifies the overall emotions communicated by the poem, but a deeper appreciation of the mood it creates in the reader, depends on analysing the tone of the writing.
A personal response begins with an overview of the poem. The poem is called a song which tells you this poem is someone speaking or singing directly to you: a lyric.
They are singing about a feeling of sadness or nostalgia for the past, which they can’t quite pinpoint or define.
In stanza 1 where are the emotive words, which appeal to your emotions and call out for a personal response?
The image of tears rising in the heart makes no sense literally or scientifically, but it appeals to us emotionally because we metaphorically see the heart as the source of emotions. Stanza 2 is based around contrasting images of sails and sun: the ‘fresh’ image of arrival and the ‘sad’ image of the sinking sun and of departure.
Does the painting here illustrate an arrival or a departure? What do these contrasting ideas have in common? The emotive heart of stanza 2 is obvious: ‘friends’ and ‘all we love’.
Notice how the images are coloured by golds and reds, and by contrasting rising and falling vocabulary and rhythms.
We can also see that stanza 2 has a refrain, a repeated phrase from the end of the first stanza which is repeated in later stanzas: ‘the days that are no more’.
We now feel the poem is provoking a complex set of emotions in response to memories of the past, with images of both joy and sadness.
The patterns of the poem suggest that it is full of comparisons, and the poet chooses similes to compare this experience to other experiences and perhaps encourages you to think of similar experiences of your own, whether in real life or in your reading.
Stanza 3 appears to be an extended metaphor and seems to tell a particular story or memory. The poem is full of patterns of repetition and small variations - compare ‘so strange’ here with ‘so fresh’ in the previous stanza.
In stanza 4 we have moved back from a particular idea to a series of more general similes. All of these comparisons try to define the ‘tears’ and link them to experiences, and finally we have a mysterious final line -’ ‘O Death in Life, the days that are not more’ - in which the abstract ideas of life and death are personified in order for you to picture what the speaker is weeping over.
The days that have passed are a reminder of death in life, and an indication of mortality.
The poem seems to be a memento mori, in other words a reminder of our own mortality.
This is very gloomy subject and a first personal response might be that the poem is morbid, or depressing.
However, poets use images and sounds in more complex ways than this, and the poem makes its sad and dark images appealing and not just gloomy. For example, the image of autumn could be seen as beautiful and happy rather than sad and depressing.
We have so far focused on the ‘sensitive’ more than the informed part of AO4.
We are sensitive to imagery and sound, and informed by the words of the texts. Is any other information needed for an ‘informed personal response?
How helpful is it to know what a poet said his poem was about?
How helpful is it to know that:
Tennyson told friends that the poem was about feelings he often had as a young boy and it was not about ‘real woe’.
Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’, responded to the death of his friend who was buried south of Tintern.
The song was set to music many times, and was a ‘hit’ in Victorian times.
By the time the poem was published, Tennyson was an established poet and Poet Laureate.
All this information is interesting, but it does not replace your own personal response, and it shows you that the mood of the reader is more significant than the mood of the writer.
Comments and information about their lives might help to reinforce your own interpretation, but they don’t replace it.
AO4 teaches us to trust our instincts, informed by the language and imagery of the text.
You should think your own response is valid as long as it is firmly grounded in analysis and interpretation of the text.
