How to tackle unseen poetry

Back at college and been asked to tackle an unseen poem? Maria shows you how…

Today we’re going to explore the unseen poetry element of your exam.  (For Edexcel A Level Literature you are asked to compare – so we will also look at how to do this.)  

Many students worry unnecessarily about trying to get to grips with a poem that they have not studied before.   However, by following some simple advice you will actually be looking forward to the exam!  (OK maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole there…)

Read on to discover how to solve the unseen poem Like Maria:

The most important thing about analysing a new poem is to have a system or framework for analysis.  This can be something your teacher showed you or one you designed for yourself.  It acts as a checklist for the exam to make sure you consider all aspects of a poem.  

Below is the checklist of 10 prompts that Maria likes to use:

TITLE
REACTION
VOICE
TONE
SOUND
STRUCTURE
IMAGERY
TECHNIQUES
THEMES
GENRE

Click here for further explanation of the prompts.  

In the Edexcel exam on unseen poetry, you are required to compare the unseen poem with one you have studied from the ‘Poems of the Decade’ anthology.   The question will provide you with a focus for the essay – this will also give you a clue as to what the unseen poem is about.  

Use this focus to inform your reading of the poem and annotate accordingly.  Make sure you think about the 10 prompts – some of them might be irrelevant to your particular unseen or the question focus but they are designed to make sure that you don’t miss anything major.  (For example – if it’s a sonnet you should recognise it by considering genre or structure…)

Now you need to think about the comparison.  You have limited time in the exam so aim to cover maybe 3 key points of comparison.

Let’s try an example question:

Click here to read Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘Boy Soldier’.
Copy, paste and print to get a real life experience of the exam.
– you will need to scroll down a bit – don’t read the analysis until afterwards!!!!

Use the 10 prompts to get an overall feel for the poem – but don’t over annotate yet!

Now think about answering the question below:

Compare how both poets explore the presentation of victims in ‘Boy Soldier’ and Roderick Ford’s ‘Giuseppe’.  

Look for points of comparison – annotate the poem according to the question
and write a plan:

e.g.

Boy Soldier

  1. boy not named –  ‘a face just like / his’ kills him’ – many victims – mass graves
  2. victim of violence – hardly noticeable ‘flick of finger on the trigger’
  3. innocence -light imagery ‘snuffs out the wicks’ – muscle

Giuseppe

  1. woman not named – identity removed – and ‘ripe golden roe’
  2. victim of violence – ‘butchered’ and eaten – separate head etc.
  3. innocence – men = guilty, mermaid can’t speak – minorities etc.

Now write a point up – you might write something like this for point 3:

​Both the boy soldier and the mermaid are presented as innocent victims of war.  D’Aguiar immediately establishes the boy’s innocence by the imagery of light in the ‘large lamp’ and ‘smaller lanterns’ used to describe his face.  The child’s youth is also emphasised by the image of his bones ‘waiting for muscle’ implying that he lacks the physical power of a man.    The use of the verb ‘snuffs’ shows how easily this light is to extinguish, enhancing the boy’s vulnerability and combining with the flippant alliteration of ‘flick of a finger’ to show how fragile his life is.  D’Aguiar portrays the boy as a tragic victim of the relentless machine of war and highlights the innocence of children trapped in such circumstances.  

Unlike the boy, Ford’s mermaid is not immediately described.  Instead we see her innocence through the guilty behaviour of the men surrounding her.  The uncle cannot look the nephew in the eye, the priest holds her hand and the doctor uses the defensive adverb ‘anyway’ to avoid responsibility.  The whole scene takes place out of site ‘behind the aquarium’ suggesting that the crime needs to be hidden.  The mermaid is repeatedly described as not being able to speak and is never given a voice except for the scream.  She is unable to defend herself as the men create her story through both their words ‘just a fish’ and actions such as separating her head and hands from her body.  The mermaid is a victim not only of war but of men’s appetites in the face of ‘starvation’. Ford uses the  vulnerable mermaid as a symbol to explore on the exploitation of innocent minorities, amongst them women, who are without a voice.  In a similar way, D’Aguiar shows how innocent children are caught up in the horrors of war and exploited unknowingly.  

​Now return to the Guardian article here and read a fuller appreciation of the poem.  

Use this format for exploring lots of unseen poems until you feel confident that you can tackle anything.

REMEMBER you do not need to understand everything about the poem – you are in control of what you talk about.  

You can find a good selection of modern verse here:

So that’s how to solve the problem of unseen poetry!

But it’s the Summer Holidays!

No one wants to do school work during the summer holidays and if you’re a student half way through GCSEs or a teacher with loads of marking, we feel your pain!

Having taught for many years, both Maria and I know the pleasure and pain of the summer holidays. On one hand, there’s the thrill of the holidays – a summer of endless possibilities, the time to do whatever you like, maybe a trip abroad, loads of sunshine but most importantly, just fun, fun, fun! On the other hand (and I feel bad even mentioning it) there’s the dread of new school year, the nightmare of the summer being over and you haven’t even thought about going back to school. The marking and general ‘homework’, the new stationery you needed to buy and that important bit of reading that you just haven’t done – I’m breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking about it!

I used to be the sort of person who left everything to the last minute. I would leave summer marking until the very last week of the holidays and then slowly make my way through the pile, moaning quite a lot to anyone around me that would listen. You’d think that this approach would have meant that I was completely care free for the rest of the summer – not thinking about my work at all. But no. I wasn’t doing the work but I also couldn’t completely forget about the work. It loomed over me like a big black cloud, leaving me to let out a sigh at the end of each day and vow that tomorrow I would get on with it. Of course, I never did.

And then everything changed when I got a new job and moved schools. The work load was suddenly so intense and there was so much of it, that I just couldn’t continue with this pattern of non-work, guilt, rushed work, guilt, deadline. I had to get a new approach or I was going to drown in paper.

So I asked another teacher how she managed her work load and the answer was really boring but also completely life changing. Her advice? Do a little bit everyday.

And so I’m passing that advice onto you. If you can spend just an hour everyday (even during the summer holidays) doing a little bit of work, everything will improve. No desperately completing the work right before the deadline, no guilt because you haven’t done the work, no constantly looming pressure because you’ve got it in hand. Chipping away at it means it never really becomes a huge problem in the first place. Set aside an hour everyday, maybe at the same time and probably in the morning to GET. STUFF. DONE. You’ll feel so much better when it’s time to go back to school – believe me.

Poetry: ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover’

This post looks at Daljit Nagra’s poem ‘ Look We Have Coming to Dover’.   It is one of the poems from the Poems of the Decade anthology studied for A Level Literature with Edexcel.  This is a rather long blog as the poem is rather complex and just keeps on giving.  Select what you will…

You can read the poem here.  

You might also like to look at the poem cited in the epigraph here – ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold.  

This is an incredibly vibrant poem which is packed with vivid visual and aural imagery  to evoke the difficulties of the immigrant journey.  There is a satirical tone that satirises the racist narratives often constructed around stereotypes.  

The title immediately alerts us to the issue of language.  The non-standard grammar plays on the stereotype of a non native speaker using the awkward sounding verb construction ‘have coming’ instead of the more usual ‘have come’.  The use of the progressive participle here, instead of the perfect tense, suggests a lack of knowledge but also reveals an interesting difference.  Presumably the voice is translating another language very literally and using the appropriate tense in the original language.  This could be taken as an illustration of fusion  of two cultures;  English lexis is combined with the grammatical construction from a different culture.  It is also the type of utterance that can be ridiculed by an unsympathetic ear.  Immediately Nagra raises the issue of humour being used to mock but the satire here is at the expense of the abusers as Nagra laughs at the abuse.  The excitement of the exclamation  hints at the promise of a better life which is immediately undermined by the inhospitable welcome demonstrated here by the perverse weather.  

In the first two stanzas, Nagra presents the immigrants lacking control or the ability to act.    The verbs  ‘stowed’ and ‘hutched’ create imagery associated with captivity and animals.  ‘Phlegmed’ suggests that the sea itself is insulting the immigrants by spitting on them, drawing on the type of abuse that many foreigners experience.  The cliffs of Dover have not provided a hospitable welcome, just as some of the British community reject the presence of the immigrants.  Indeed the pun on ‘prow’d’ and the verb ‘lording’ suggest people looking down upon the newly arrived and relate to imagery from a feudal era.  

The poem is a parody of the type of narrative often constructed by anti-immigration campaigners.  The voice refers ironically to ‘swarms of us’ picking up on the sort of derogatory and offensive language that is often employed to describe outsiders.  (David Cameron famously used the word ‘swarm’ in a derogatory manner, attracting immense criticism.)  The semantic field of insects implies a homogeneity and has negative connotations of plague.  Nagra employs such imagery to laugh at the insecurities of a population of tabloid readers who believe everything they read.  

It is also notable that the immigrants lack identity in the first stanza, demonstrated by the lack of pronouns; we do not know who is ‘stowed’.   As the poem progresses, we get the suggestion of community through the use of the possessive determiner ‘our’ and then the plural first person pronoun ‘we’.  This helps to establish a presence and a voice.  Eventually, the voice narrows to an individual ‘I’ showing a personality has emerged from the ‘swarms’.  

The sibilance and alliteration of ‘Stowed in the sea to invade’ conjure up the sound of the sea and are also reminiscent of Old English alliterative verse, suggesting a certain primitiveness in the account of the voyage as well as highlighting the threat that some believe immigrants present.  This, however, also reminds the reader that England is part of an island nation whose population is made up of invaders.  Nagra successfully mingles the suggestion of racist attitudes with an ironic reminder of history. 

The white cliffs of Dover are a traditional symbol of Britishness referring to justice and, in World War II, offering a sense of hope and resistance against the Nazi regime.  Now these cliffs are crumbling and ‘scummed’ some would say by the immigrant population  but Nagra reverses this suggesting that they are now tainted by racism.    The voice of the poem laughs at the ‘yobbish rain’ and the thunder that ‘unbladders’, while also making fun of the stereotypical preoccupation of the British with their weather.  Indeed the talk of weather suggests that the voice is well used to British conversation.  

Nagra has an intimate knowledge of English and demonstrates it in all its rich diversity.  Lexis such as ‘cushy’, ‘sundry’ and ‘hoick’ show an easy familiarity with informal language as do the  idiomatic ‘stab in the back’, ‘bare-faced’ and ‘unclocked’.  The word ‘vex’ came into English from Latin via French and is used by Shakespeare.  It is evidence of the long history that goes to make up a modern society and its recent resurgence is testimony to the adaptability of the language.  The anthimeria (creating a noun from a verb) of ‘phlegmed’ and ‘Blair’d’ demonstrate a linguistic creativity that here reflects the sentiment of the epigraph ‘so various, so beautiful, so new…’.  Nagra  here demonstrates a masterful command of the language.  

The last stanza focusses in on an individual experience and relationship, as does Arnold’s original.  There is a sense of having reached a possible, maybe ‘imagined’ destination and having left a state of being ‘hutched’ to be ‘free’.  The word ‘free’ itself sits alone after the caesura at the end of a line as a syntactic  demonstration of  independence but note that it is still enclosed by punctuation.  Glasses are raised ‘East’ in a celebration of difference and achievement.  The immigrant voice may express the position of the second generation who have become accepted in the Blairite atmosphere of plenty.  The voice refers to those who have ‘beeswax’d cars’, a typical image of middle England, and asks the reader to ‘imagine’ again with a sense of irony.  The immigrant has the last laugh as Nagra refers satirically again to the prejudiced who might talk of ‘babbling’ and ‘lingoes’.

The structure of this poem suggests the sea both in terms of graphology and meter.  Lines increase in syllable length through each stanza suggesting a flowing tide.  Each stanza starts with an initial ‘s’ sibilance to illustrate the sea  until the last which imagines the journey over.  There is progression from the boat journey to the Bedford van and then to an end destination of a settled domestic life.  

I hope that this has given you some starting ideas.  For help with further exploration of the poem go to Like Maria’s Poetryfile website.

King of Kings

Some of you may already be familiar with Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ from the cult TV series ‘Breaking Bad’.  In fact, the poem itself has become so famous that we frequently use it as a cultural reference to someone powerful who might meet a sticky end.  You can read it here.

The boastful voice of Ozymandias, quoted by Shelley, who paraphrases an ancient historian (Diadorus of Sicily), comes across powerfully in this poem:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!’

The King of Kings probably meant to communicate that other ‘Mighty’ people should envy his works and despair that they will not achieve his greatness.  However, Shelley twists the meaning to recognise the temporary nature of mortal power.  Nothing remains of the king’s work – so if we look at his works now, we may well despair at the destruction of such achievements and the realisation that all will eventually turn to dust.

Not exactly life affirming then!  But we should remember that Shelley was a Romantic poet who was thrown out of Oxford for being an atheist – much to his dad’s disapproval!  The Romantics saw themselves as kind of poetic prophets who interpreted the world differently.  Here, Shelley stresses the vast power of nature over human endeavour as the ‘boundless and bare’ sands ‘stretch’ far into the distance and continue to bury the ‘half sunk’ face of civilisation.

For more on this poem watch our video aimed at GCSE Literature students here or download our study pack from the shop.

Hamilton arrives on Disney+

You won’t find Hamilton on any Media or Film specification yet but when a media product arrives that has global impact, it’s difficult to ignore.

As a massive fan of Hamilton, I couldn’t pass up this chance to make a video about the film release. I say film, but it’s not like other film musicals and it’s important not to put it in the same category as Les Miserables (Hooper 2012) and especially not Cats (Hooper 2019).

Hamilton (Kail 2020) is a filmed version of the stage show. Recorded over several nights, the film version offers audiences ‘the best seat in the house’. Although it does use a range of shots, the camera work doesn’t distract from the theatre experience and encourages a really good sing (rap) along..

Hamilton is particularly interesting for Media students from a institutional point of view. Why did Disney + choose to release it onto its streaming service rather than at cinemas? And what does this mean for the future of film production and distribution? To find the answers to these and other questions, have a look at our video or look out for my article coming soon to Media Magazine.

Right, I’m off to ‘The Room Where it Happens’, see you again soon.

Caroline

Surviving lockdown

Struggling with Unseen Poetry? We have a video just for you!

2020 has been such a strange year so far and if you’ve been studying for GCSE and A Level qualifications, you might have found it particularly hard. Well done for making it through the academic year and well done too, to parents and teachers who have faced enormous challenges keeping things running smoothly.

We hope surviving lockdown hasn’t left you feeling washed out, fed up and stressed but if you are worried about your progress at school, we really hope we can help you get back on track.

Lots of our videos are available for free on our Youtube channel but if you want a bit more support, why not look at the resource packs available in our shop? We’re adding to these all the time, so check back to see if the topic you’re interested in is covered and if it’s not, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do!

We really hope this next academic year goes well for you – keep in touch!

Caroline