Year 11 Name.. Poetry Anthology English Literature Unseen Poetry Practice

Transcription

1 Year 11 Name.. Poetry Anthology English Literature Unseen Poetry Practice Assessment Objectives AO1: Read, understand and respond to texts. Students should be able to: maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations. AO2: Analyse the language, form and used by a writer to create meanings and effects, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate. AO3: Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written. The Exam In the exam you will be expected to compare two poems that you have not studied before; use this booklet as practice for the exam.

2 A Wife in London by Thomas Hardy I--The Tragedy She sits in the tawny vapour That the City lanes have uprolled, Behind whose webby fold on fold Like a waning taper The street-lamp glimmers cold. A messenger's knock cracks smartly, Flashed news is in her hand Of meaning it dazes to understand Though shaped so shortly: He--has fallen--in the far South Land... II--The Irony 'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker, The postman nears and goes: A letter is brought whose lines disclose By the firelight flicker His hand, whom the worm now knows: Fresh--firm--penned in highest feather - Page-full of his hoped return, And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn In the summer weather, And of new love that they would learn the

3 Dulce et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas -shells dropping softly behind. Gas! Gas! Quick boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.- Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Wilfred Owen the

4 Mametz Wood For years afterwards the farmers found them the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades as they tended the land back into itself. A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger, the blown and broken bird s egg of a skull, All mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns. And even now the earth stands sentinel, reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin. This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre In boots that outlasted them, their socketed heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open. the As if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing, slipped from their absent tongues. Owen Sheers (2005)

5 The Manhunt (Laura's Poem), by Simon Armitage After the first phase, after passionate nights and intimate days, only then would he let me trace the frozen river which ran through his face, only then would he let me explore the blown hinge of his lower jaw, and handle and hold the damaged, porcelain collar-bone, and mind and attend the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade, and finger and thumb the parachute silk of his punctured lung. Only then could I bind the struts and climb the rungs of his broken ribs, and feel the hurt of his grazed heart. Skirting along, only then could I picture the scan, the foetus of metal beneath his chest where the bullet had finally come to rest. Then I widened the search, traced the scarring back to its source the to a sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind, around which every nerve in his body had tightened and closed. Then, and only then, did I come close.

6 The Soldier If I should die, think only this of me: That there s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. the Brooke

7 A Wife in London Mametz Wood The Soldier Compare how war is presented in two of these poems. You should write about: - The language used by the poets - How they have used form and - Their attitudes and feelings towards war Dulce et Decorum est The Manhunt