Down By The Sally Gardens

W.B. Yeats's poem sung with soul.

AS Poetry: the theme of home

Click on the image to enlarge

The Challenges of Teaching Poetry by Billy Collins

The Challenges in Teaching Poetry

An acronym to help plan an answer for unseen poetry

This is is just a prompt for the main areas and it does not include poetic technique such as assonance, alliteration, enjambement, sibilance, narrators, etc. BUT this is a good framework to start you off with ideas for making sense of a poem.

FLIRT -  Do YOU flirt with poetry?

Form and Structure

Language (Lexis)

Imagery (similes, metaphors and personification, etc.)

Rhythm and Rhyme

Tone (the attitude of the speaker to the content/audience) AND Themes

"TOYS" by Coventry Patmore and a link to an interpretation of the poem

Written in the early 1860s after losing his wife, Coventry Patmore's poem discloses the oscillating feelings of severity and tenderness that were so prevalent in his personality. He went to visit William Barnes in Dorchester as each had recently lost their wives and were now widowers with a similar number of children. This poem reflects Old and New Testment ideas in its structure, and, Patmore's "Toys" were probably the trappings of this world, which would be no more than "toys" in the eyes of God.




After having a go at interpreting the poem yourselves, read this interpretation English Teacher Man.

http://englishteacherman.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/afatherslove/

The Key Feature of A Poem for AS poetry

"Infant Joy" by William Blake

Can you recognise this AS poem on the theme of 'home'

To my classes.

This a poem that we studied this year. But can you identify it from this image? Again, why are some words seemingly more important and significant than others?

AS Word Cloud Quiz

Guess the poems! And why do think some words are bigger?

How about revising with word clouds?

Click on the image to enlarge.

What about a whole new way to revise your AOs 1-3? Why not produce a few word clouds on poetic terms or for particular poems? You could do the same for the theme of home and links between the poems.
http://www.wordle.net/

AS Poetry - The Theme of Home as a Word Cloud

Click on the image to enlarge

AS practice essay questions linked to the theme of home

Practice Essay Questions for AS Poetry on the Theme of Home.

Prepare an essay plan for one of the following essay questions. We will discuss it in class after 20 minutes.

A.
“Poets often refer to home as a place of memory”

In the light of this claim compare and contrast the presentation of home in two poems that you studied.


B.
‘Some poems in the ‘Anthology’ focus on home as a place of happiness or melancholy.’

In the light of this claim compare and contrast Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing” with a poem of your choice.


C.
‘Several poems deal with relationships between parents and children.’

Compare and contrast the presentation of relationships in “Toys” and a poem of your choice.

Tennyson's "Mariana": notes on recently discussed AO1 and AO2 Terms

It is a poem in which very little happens - but Mariana's rising emotional intensity.

Background
The subject of this poem is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's play "Measure for Measure": "Mariana in the moated grange." This line describes a young woman waiting for her lover Angelo, who has abandoned her upon the loss of her dowry. Just as the epigraph from Shakespeare contains no verb, the poem, too, lacks all action or narrative movement. Instead, the entire poem serves as an extended visual depiction of melancholy isolation.

Some lexis

'athwart - archaic and sets a tone

'marrish-mosses' - marshy mosses - again an archaic usage, rather like 'cometh' earlier - helps create tone and atmostphere.

archaic – a word no longer in use – used long ago

'casement' – an archaic word for window


Remember that the choice of form and changes within it affects emotion in poetry (D. H. Lawrence )

Tetrameter - eight syllables a line

Trimeter - six syllables a line

A Refrain – repeated lines or stanzas

Melancholy often achieved through adjectives and imagery applied to the senses, e.g. sound.

Anaphora is a rhetorical device and it can be seen in the repetition in the way lines in one stanza begins with  “Old . . .”

“Old . . .”
“Old . . .” (Stanza Six, “Mariana” )
Epizeuxis -“aweary, aweary” ( “Mariana”) (Repeated words on the same line.)
Ekphrasis – detailed description that enables readers to picture what is described.

A spondee - the line’s rhythm is slowed down to emphasise how time has become elongated for Mariana in the final stanza of the poem with “Slow Clock”
The theme of home – isolation and abandonment in “Mariana”
“Mariana” was written when Alfred Tennyson was only 21, shortly after the death of his friend Arthur Hallem.

Is it a psychological poem? The study of psychology was only just beginning – Sleep-walking, the rising intensity of Mariana’s despair. In 1802, French physiologist Pierre Cabanis helped to pioneer   biological psychology with his essay Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man). Cabanis interpreted the mind in light of his previous studies of biology, arguing that sensibility and soul are properties of the nervous system

Is the poem influenced by then fashionable Gothic? Gothic novels were rising in popularity. “Frankenstein” and “The Castle of Otranto” have nightmare scenarios that are highly atmospheric.

Medieval - the Victorians thought up the idea that this period was  "the middles ages" and that they, of course, lived in the modern age
Form ( AO2 )
"Mariana" takes the form of seven twelve-line stanzas, each of which is divided into three four-line rhyme units according to the pattern ABAB CDDC EFEF. The lines ending in E and F remain essentially the same in every stanza and thus serve as a bewitching, chant-like refrain throughout the poem. All of the poem's lines fall into iambic tetrameter, with the exception of the trimeter of the tenth and twelfth lines. The form helps emphasise the frustrating tedium of Mariana’s nightmarish existence as she awaits a lover who appears to have abandoned her.

Third person with direct speech from Mariana.

Structurally, the poem’s time-frame is over an evening, night and morning.

Symbols
One of the most important symbols in the poem is the poplar tree described in the fourth and fifth stanzas. On one level, the poplar can be interpreted as a kind of phallic symbol. It certainly adds to the poem's gothic atmosphere in the way the shadow of the tree falls across Mariana's bed.

Practice Essay Question

Several Poems in John Wain’s “Anthology” focus on home as a place of grief or loss.

Compare and contrast the poets’ presentation of grief or loss in two poems from the “Anthology”.

The Poetry Terminology Quiz by Famous Poems.Org

I took the Poetry Terminology Quiz at Famous Poems.org

My results: Ultimate Poetry Guru! My Score Average The average quiz taker scored 65%, while I scored a whopping 100%! How's that for a poetry expert?

Think you can do better? Head to the Famous Poems Library and Take the Quiz!

"Amazing! We don't know how you did it, but there it is, right as rain. Only a handful of people has ever scored perfectly on our quiz. And hundreds, if not thousands, of future quiz takers will try to do what you've just done and fail miserably. You've got a gift, my friend!"

I did this for a laugh; however, it would have been an embarrassment to get less than 100% as I teach the study of poetry for a living! However, for some fun-time revision, see how well you can do!

http://www.famous-poems.org/quiz

Here's another brief quiz with some broader questions on poetry through the ages:

http://www.quizmoz.com/quizzes/Literature-Quizzes/t/The-Poetry-Quiz.asp

Essay Planning for AS English Literature Exam Essays ( Concept Map )

On the right you will find a generic plan for planning AS English Literature essays for comparing poems in the Edexcel Exam. Try it out by adding brief, phrase-like notes from each poem to see whether it helps you plan and write better essays. Aim to select poems that enable you to compare (what is similar) and contrast (what is different) in how each poet presents the theme of "home".

Of course, if this method of planning is not as effective as the one you use, ignore this post.

Click on the image to enlarge.

For a method that works even better, try the acronym S. T. R. I. D. E. and add Form and Structure to it. It might also be a good idea to add Voice, including First or Third person narrator

See this link for a fuller explanation of this effective method:
http://goforgold-dog.blogspot.com/2007/07/strive-or-stride-help-with-reading-and.html

Poetic Forms

Read the mini essays on several poetic forms from this link.
http://poetry-forms.suite101.com/
The more you know about form, the better you will be able to handle the AO2 criteria: Form, Structure and Language.

Poetic Form - The Structure of a Villanelle

AO2 examines language, form and structure. We have been studying a couple of villanelles for unseen tests. Emily Bishop's "One Art" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" are both well known examples of this form. AS students should read the article below as its points on how to comment on the structure of villanelles is exemplary.
http://poetry-forms.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_structure_of_a_villanelle

"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

by Dylan Thomas

Notes on "The Candle Indoors" by Gerald Manley Hopkins

Here's an interpretation of the poem.

http://www.magickalmind.com/dorian/hopkins.html

And another reading of this poem
http://www.nd.edu/~dayling/content/documents/Academic/Lancaster%20University/ENGFAITH.pdf

Robert Graves: "Parent To Children" - Notes

Graves's diary entries for the poem in September to October 1936
http://graves.uvic.ca/xbrowse.xq?query_stored=false&collection=%2Fdb%2Fgraves%2Fentries&start=1&search_text=-1&type=diaryentry&n=1936-09-21
Notes on these entries
http://graves.uvic.ca/xrequest.xq?new_search=true&action=search&search_text=Parent+to+Children&kw_match=all&returns=10&abstract=on&diaryentry=on&enclosure=on&logentries=on&sort=date&order=ascending&start_day=22&start_month=02&start_year=1935&end_day=06&end_month=05&end_year=1939

Thomas Hardy on an earlier Dorset poet, William Barnes

William Barnes 1801–1886

In 1918 Thomas Humphry Ward published in several volumes, The English Poets. The works of the poets being introduced by another author. The works of William Barnes, the ‘Dorset Poet’ were introduced by that other Dorset poet and author, Thomas Hardy, and it is that introduction which follows.
The veil of a dialect, through which except in a few cases readers have to discern whatever of real poetry there may be in William Barnes, is disconcerting to many, and to some distasteful, chiefly, one thinks, for a superficial reason which has more to do with spelling than with the dialect itself. As long as the spelling of standard English is other than phonetic it is not obvious why that of the old Wessex language should be phonetic, except in a pronouncing dictionary. We have however to deal with Barnes’s verse as he chose to write it, merely premising that his aim in the exact literation of Dorset words is not necessarily to exhibit humour and grotesqueness.
It often seemed strange to lovers of Barnes that he, a man of insight and reading, should have persisted year after year to sing in a tongue which, though a regular growth and not a provincial corruption, is indubitably fast perishing. He said that he could nothelp it. But he may have seen the unwisdom of such self-limitation — at those times, let us suppose, when he appeared to be under an uncontrollable impulse to express his own feelings, and to convey an ampler interpretation of life than his rustic vehicle would carry unenlarged, which resulted in his putting into the mouths of husbandmen compound epithets that certainly no user of the dialect ever concocted out of his own brain, and subtle sentiments that would have astonished those husbandmen and their neighbours.
But though true dramatic artistry lies that way, the way of all who differentiate imaginative revelation from the blind transcripts of a reporter’s note-book, it was probably from some misgivings on the score of permanence that now and then he would turn a lyric in “common English,” and once or twice brought out a little volume so written as an experiment. As usual, the prepossessions of his cocksure critics would not allow them to tolerate what they had not been accustomed to, a new idea, and the specimens were coldly received; which seems to have discouraged him. Yet in the opinion of the present writer the ordinary language which, as a school-master, Barnes taught for nearly forty years, could soon have been moulded to verse as deftly as dialect by a man whose instinct it was to catch so readily the beat of hearts around him. I take as an example the lines (which I translate) on the husband who comes home from abroad to find his wife long dead : —
“The rose was dust that bound her brow,Moth-eaten was her Sunday cape,Her frock was out of fashion now,Her shoes were dried up out of shape —Those shoes that once had glittered blackAlong the upland’s beaten track;”
and his frequent phrases like that of the autumn sun “wandering wan,” the “wide-horned cows,” the “high-sunned” noons, the “hoarse cascade,” the “hedgerow-bramble’s swinging bow.”
Barnes, in fact, surprising as it may seem to those who know him, and that but a little, as a user of dialect only, was an academic poet, akin to the school of Gray and Collins, rather than a spontaneous singer of rural songs in folk-language like Burns, or an extemporizer like the old balladists. His apparently simple unfoldings are as studied as the so-called simple Bible-narratives are studied; his rhymes and alliterations often cunningly schematic. The speech of his ploughmen and milkmaids in his Eclogues — his own adopted name for these pieces — is as sound in its syntax as that of the Tityrus and Meliboeus of Virgil whom he had in mind, and his characters have often been likened to the shepherds and goatherds in the idylls of Theocritus.
Recognition came with the publication of the first series of Dorset poems in 1844, though some reviewers were puzzled whether to criticize them on artistic or philological grounds; later volumes however were felt to be the poetry of profound art by Coventry Patmore, F. T. Palgrave, H. M. Moule, and others. They saw that Barnes, behind his word-screen’, had a quality of the great poets, a clear perception or instinct that human emotion is the primary stuff of poetry.
Repose and content mark nearly all of Barnes’s verse; he shows little or none of the spirit of revolt which we find in Burns; nothing of the revolutionary politics of Beranger. He held himself artistically aloof from the ugly side of things — or perhaps shunned it unconsciously; and we escape in his pictures the sordid miseries that are laid bare in Crabbe, often to the destruction of charm. But though he does not probe life so deeply as the other parson-poet I have named, he conserves the poetic essence more carefully, and his reach in his highest moments, as exampled by such a poignant lyric as The Wife a-lost, or by the emotional music of Woak Hill, or The Wind at the Door, has been matched by few singers below the best.
THOMAS HARDY.

This is a link for more information on Barnes and where you can listen to one of his poems

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southampton/voices2005/poet.shtml