poetry, remaster, understanding, tools, imagery, sound devices, form, structure, mood, theme, biography, history, topics, tasks GettInG Started

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1 poetry, remaster, understanding, tools, imagery, sound devices, form, structure, mood, theme, biography, history, topics, tasks GettInG Started

2 1 what's ahead the aim of this book So what does your teacher want? examining poems: william Shakespeare and Bruce dawe Imagery Sound devices Poetic form and structure Mood and theme authorial and historical contexts Bringing it all together Features of this book

3 the aim of this BooK Poetry is often considered by students to be some kind of arcane code, incomprehensible to all but a lucky few initiates who have been given the key that allows them to unlock the meaning that lies hidden within. Yet when adults refl ect back on their schooling years, what often sticks with them is the poetry they read: those few lines that linger in their memories. When you make the connection with poetry, when the poet speaks to you, there is no more elevated experience in literature. However, it s not really possible to teach someone to love poetry; that s an individual experience you need to discover for yourself. Regardless of whether you love poetry or hate it or just don t quite get it, many of you are required to study it at school, write essays on it and complete exam tasks on it. That s where this book can help. Poetry Remastered is intended to be a practical guide for senior secondary students of English and Literature who are studying poetry or plays written in verse (such as Shakespeare s plays). Each chapter will examine different aspects of poetry, drawing examples from poets who are most commonly studied in senior English and Literature classes. As well as looking at particular poems and discussing how you might approach them, this book aims to give you the skills to write an essay on any poem, whether you ve seen it before or not. A wide range of different styles of essay questions and tasks will be covered. These will enable you to meet your study requirements, whether you are using a collection of poetry as source material for ideas related to a particular context (as in the Creating and Presenting area of study in the Victorian VCE study design), or whether you have a set poetry text and are asked to discuss a particular view with reference to your prescribed text and at least one other related text of your own choosing (as in the New South Wales HSC English [Standard] exam), or whether you are simply given a few poems and the instruction to use one or more of the passages selected as the basis for a discussion of the poetry of [the particular poet] (as in the Victorian VCE Literature exam). 2 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

4 1 In film or sound recording, the master is the original from which copies can be made. When a recording is remastered a new master is made, usually to improve the sound quality or clarity. Similarly, Poetry Remastered aims to present poems and associated writing tasks with as much clarity as possible. Above all, it aims to clarify that seemingly obscure question: What do teachers (or examiners) actually want? If this books succeeds, then you will be able to master poetry in a different sense: you will attain complete knowledge or skill in responding to it. So what does your teacher want? As with other kinds of texts that you might write about (novels, plays, films, news articles and so on), teachers and examiners want you to demonstrate that you have thought carefully about the particular work that you have studied and have some understanding of its meaning. They also want you to demonstrate an understanding of how the particular tools available to the author of this text type are used to create that meaning. 1 Getting started 3

5 imagery a poetic technique used to shape visual ideas and create pictures in our heads when we read; the elements of a poem that inspire the senses metaphor the description of one thing in terms of something else simile the comparison of one thing with another using like or as personification a type of metaphor that gives human characteristics or features to something that is not human sound devices the elements that draw attention to the sounds that words make rhyme the correspondence of sounds between words or word endings, especially at the ends of lines of poetry Novelists usually work with such things as plot, setting and character to convey the ideas that they have. Among many other decisions that they make, they may decide to write in the third person ( He woke up feeling groggy ) or the fi rst person ( I woke up feeling groggy ). Film directors need to decide how scenes will be lit, what camera angles to use, whether to use a close-up or a long shot, and how to edit the fi lm. In the same way, poets have various tools at their disposal and you should show that you understand what those tools are and how they are used by the poet. The following chapters focus on these different tools, and each chapter will explain how poets employ them in their poems and what you can say about them in an essay. Chapter 2 will examine imagery: the techniques poets use to create pictures in the reader s mind, including metaphor, simile and personification. Chapter 3 will examine sound devices: elements that you can hear when a poem is read aloud, such as rhyme, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. Chapter 4 will look at poetic form and structure, including specifi c forms such as the sonnet and the villanelle as well as more general aspects of structure like stanzas, punctuation and line breaks. Chapter 5 will discuss the mood that poets create in their work as well as the themes that they explore. The focus of Chapter 6 will be the authorial context for a poem (how the poem fi ts into the body of the poet s work and perhaps connects with elements of the poet s life) as well as its historical context (how the poem may connect with ideas prevalent at the time of its composition and events that took place then). The fi nal chapter will bring everything together, looking at a range of sample topics and different kinds of tasks. examining PoeMS To see what is meant by the different tools that are available to poets, let s look at a couple of examples. William Shakespeare is probably the most famous writer who ever existed. His name is familiar to every student and his plays and poems are very widely taught. We will look at a mix of extracts from his plays as well as his poems in this book. Sonnet 18 is one of the best known from his sequence of sonnets. Bruce Dawe is one of Australia s most popular living poets and his work, particularly the collection Sometimes Gladness, from which A Double Haunting is taken, is frequently taught in Australian schools. 4 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

6 1 alliteration the repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together assonance the repetition of vowel sounds in words that are near each other onomatopoeia the formation and use of words and phrases that sound like what they are describing; e.g. fi zz, splash, pop, hiss sonnet a poem of 14 lines with 10 syllables each and a set rhyme scheme. Shakespearean or English sonnets rhyme abab/cdcd/efef/gg and Petrarchan or Italian sonnets rhyme abba/ abba/cdecde Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow st, Nor shall death brag thou wander st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow st, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. villanelle an old form of poetry that originated in Italy in the sixteenth century with specifi c rules that should be followed, including that the poem must have fi ve stanzas of three lines each followed by a sixth, which has four lines. It should also have an aba rhyme scheme in each stanza except for the fi nal stanza, which should rhyme abaa stanza a grouping of lines within a poem, usually separated from other stanzas by a space line break the end of a line of poetry, where the reader turns to the start of the next line; the line breaks play an important role in the way we read and interpret the poem 1 GettinG started 5

7 A Double Haunting Bruce Dawe Man will always be haunted by his world Though he should escape for a time by sealing himself In plexiglass abstractions, equipped with fi ltered air Pumped from underground purifi ers, though he should Call green his enemy, inoculate his heart Against the virus of mutability, Quarter the ocean and atmosphere, fouling what s left With oil-slick and fumes excreta of his contempt Even before the wind changes, the tide returns him his folly, He will ache unexpectedly for the boyishness of plants, For rogue elephant grasses, the Yarra Bank crankiness Of trees, jungles to sweat in and out of, And the head-down happiness of beasts with their innocent loyalties. And the world, in its turn, for a time will be haunted by man Even after his vapour-trails have scrawled their Omega Over the evening heavens, kindly or gross His shadow will fall on the ground and the beasts in their browsing Tremble a moment remembering, the rivers and seas pause as they Dwindle to rivers and seas, the leaves and the vines Sigh in the simpler wind for the old touch of Latin And for men to push through them and set up a camp in the clearing. 6 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

8 1 Imagery Shakespeare turns the poetic techniques of metaphor, simile and personification into the very subject matter of his poem in Sonnet 18. Each of these techniques involves the process of comparing one thing to another: metaphor simply states that one thing is another; simile says that one thing is like another; and personification gives human attributes to something nonhuman in order to compare relevant characteristics. Shakespeare begins this poem by having the speaker ask the person being addressed ( thee meaning you ) if he or she should be compared to a summer s day. By doing so, he is playing with imagery very common in love poetry of the time (and still popular today). If you told your loved one that he or she reminded you of a summer s day, then you might reasonably expect an impressed reaction. A summer s day is presumably warm and sunny and nice. Or so we might think. Shakespeare breaks down the comparison, pointing out all the ways in which the addressee of the sonnet is superior. He observes that summer days aren t all they re cracked up to be, sometimes being too windy ( Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May remember he was writing in the northern hemisphere), or too hot or too cloudy ( And often is his gold complexion dimmed ). 1 Getting started 7

9 Where the comparison really falls down, though, Shakespeare suggests, is in the fact that summer ends ( And summer s lease hath all too short a date ). This is not a problem for the person being addressed in the poem, however, for Shakespeare claims to have discovered a formula for immortality: a reason why thy eternal summer shall not fade. And that reason is this very poem. The subject of the poem shall live forever in eternal lines, even if they must bodily die like all of us. And the beautiful thing about this grandiose claim is that we re proving it right by reading it now more than four centuries after it was written. Look closer 1 The idea of a haunting mentioned in the title of Dawe s poem and the first line of each stanza could be described as a metaphor. Why do you think Dawe wanted to evoke the image of a haunting to describe the way that people treat the natural environment around them? 2 The main form of imagery that Dawe uses in his poem is personifi cation. How many instances of personifi cation can you fi nd in the poem? 3 How does the personifi cation work to create meaning in the poem, particularly in the context of comparing the man-made world with the natural world? 8 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

10 1 Sound devices When it comes to the sound device of rhyme, A Double Haunting is less obvious than Sonnet 18, which employs the standard rhyme scheme for what is known as the Shakespearean sonnet. Dawe doesn t overtly use rhyme at all in his poem and certainly not end rhyme but there are some sound echoes that he uses, such as the internal rhyme of Bank and crank (iness) towards the end of the first stanza. Alliteration and assonance are more prevalent in Dawe s poem, such as the alliteration of the b sound in beasts in their browsing and the hard c in camp in the clearing. The repetition of the sentence structure also creates a kind of half rhyme between the two lines, establishing a connection between them. Note that when it comes to sound devices, it s not very interesting just to point them out, observing that the poet uses a particular rhyme scheme and uses this or that example of alliteration or onomatopoeia. It s more interesting if you have some idea of why the poet might have used it, and what effect the technique has on the reader. One thing that rhyme, alliteration and assonance all do is emphasise a particular word or phrase, and we may speculate on why the poet would want to create that emphasis. That, of course, would relate in some way to the overall meaning of the poem, the message that the poet is trying to convey. By connecting the sounds in the two phrases quoted above, Dawe creates a contrast between the animals (beasts) in a world without humans and the idea of human habitation (making a camp in the clearing ) that still haunts them. The alliteration therefore supports the opposition between humans and nature that Dawe explores in his poem. 1 Getting started 9

11 Look closer 1 The phrase Sigh in the simpler wind from the penultimate line in A Double Haunting contains assonance in the repeated short i sound in in, simpler and wind. Can you think of any effect that this may have? 2 Neither of these two poems contains an obvious example of onomatopoeia (the sound of a word resembling what it describes). We will look at examples of onomatopoeia in the chapter on sound devices. Why might a poet want to include onomatopoeia in a poem? 3 Shakespeare s Sonnet 18 is very regular in its rhyme scheme, but this is not always the case in his sonnets. Why might a poet break the rhyme scheme in a poem? What effect might the poet be aiming for (if we assume that they haven t done it simply because they couldn t think of an appropriate rhyme)? iambic pentameter a common metre or measurement of sound patterns in a poem in which a line of 10 syllables is accented on every second beat. ( Pentameter means measure of fi ve ) quatrain a four-line stanza that usually rhymes rhyming couplet two successive lines of poetry that rhyme with each other Poetic form and structure As its title indicates, Sonnet 18 has an obvious and recognisable form. The sonnet is one of the most popular poetic forms ever devised and Shakespeare is probably its most notable practitioner. A style of sonnet is even named after him, and Sonnet 18 is a perfect example of that style. It has 14 lines, as do all sonnets; it is written in iambic pentameter (with the stress falling on every second syllable in a 10-syllable line), and it has a rhyme scheme that helps divide the 14 lines into smaller units of three quatrains (units of four lines) and a closing rhyming couplet (two lines). 10 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

12 1 A rhyme scheme that works in units of four lines before the closing couplet (abab/cdcd/efef/gg) helps us to divide the argument into separate points that the poet is making. Shakespeare emphasises these breaks with punctuation as well, ending the fourth and eighth lines of the poem with colons to give a greater pause before moving on to the next point. (The whole poem is actually one long sentence after the initial question in the first line.) Furthermore, as he frequently does in his other sonnets as well, Shakespeare employs what is known as a volta (or turn) at the beginning of the ninth line. When we see or hear the word But we understand that there is a shift in the argument, that a slightly different point is about to be made. In the first quatrain we get the initial question about comparing a loved one to a summer s day and the first response, suggesting that the person the poem is being addressed to is actually better than a summer s day, because of the windiness and brief nature of summer. The second quatrain continues the catalogue of problems with summer, pointing out that it can also be too hot or cloudy, adding to the argument the important element that (in nature at least) things inevitably lose their beauty. The third quatrain, with its volta, then turns the argument on its head, suggesting that the person being addressed is somehow exempt from this rule and shall not fade. rhyme scheme the ordered patterns of rhymes at the ends of lines in a poem volta a turn, usually indicating a change in mood or direction in a sonnet; often occurring around the ninth line, although it can come earlier or later 1 Getting started 11

13 The repetition of lines beginning with Nor emphasises this point as the poet argues that even death is out of luck when it comes to this person, for the reason given in the fi nal line of the quatrain: he or she will live on in these eternal lines. The final couplet emphasises this point through its rhyme and the repetition of the phrase So long at the beginning of each line. As long as there are people alive who can read, then posterity is assured for the subject of this poem. The important thing to recognise when writing about poetic form, however, is that the form is not necessarily interesting in its own right. Whether Shakespeare decided to write a sonnet or use a different form is neither here nor there. What is interesting is how the form is used to enhance the ideas being expressed in the poem. Look closer 1 Bruce Dawe s poem doesn t have a specifi c named form as Shakespeare s does, but it obviously does have a structure of some sort, being divided into two stanzas. What can you say about the split between the stanzas? Is there a shift in the poem? 2 Compare the opening line of each stanza in A Double Haunting. How do these lines relate to each other? 3 How does Dawe s use of punctuation structure his poem? You might note the dash beginning the second line of each stanza and the fact that each stanza is a single sentence. 12 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

14 1 Mood and theme Mood and theme are grouped together in a chapter of this book, but they re quite different from each other in nature. Mood refers to the way a poem feels, whereas theme refers to the idea or ideas in a poem. Mood is more suggestive and emotional and theme is more intellectual and rational. Sticking with Sonnet 18 for the moment, we might say that its themes are mutability (interestingly, this is a word that Dawe uses in his poem it means being liable to change and has the same root as the word mutate ) and the power of art to withstand change. Love is also an underlying theme the poem is addressed to a lover but the main point of the poem doesn t seem to be to communicate how much the speaker loves the person being addressed, but rather to convey the idea that this person will live forever in the poem (or at least as long as there are still people around to read it). If we look at what the poem actually says about the lover, we notice that only the second line is explicitly about his or her qualities (stating that the person being addressed is more lovely and more temperate than a summer s day). The rest of the poem is about the imperfections of summer and how the poem will preserve the lover within its lines for all time, so we can see where the main emphasis lies. The mood of the poem is a bit trickier to pin down. When you re writing about mood you need to look to the suggestive elements of words and phrases: their connotations. Poems that have an identifiable setting can use that setting to establish the mood, but this poem is more abstract. Neither does Sonnet 18 have characters as such, merely a speaker and an addressee, so that doesn t help set the mood either. In some sense the mood might be described as pessimistic or cynical in the first two quatrains, in that they point out all of the drawbacks in the idea of a summer s day, which we might otherwise have thought of in positive terms. Negative words like rough, dimmed and declines predominate. The volta swings the mood around to a much more optimistic idea (that the poem will preserve this person forever) but it s still expressed in negative terms in terms of what will not happen. It s really only in the final couplet that the argument is expressed in positive terms, especially in the final line with the words lives and life combating the preceding images of death and decline. connotation an idea or feeling evoked by a word in addition to its main or literal meaning 1 Getting started 13

15 Look closer 1 What would you identify as the main theme or themes of A Double Haunting? 2 Dawe uses the word mutability in his poem, and this also seems to be one of the themes in Shakespeare s poem. Are the two poets saying similar things? Compare the two poems in terms of this theme. 3 Which words or phrases work to create the mood of Dawe s poem? Identify fi ve different words or short phrases and look at their connotations. Use a dictionary to help you with the connotations. (A dictionary is a very useful tool for analysing poetry.) authorial and historical contexts In some exam or essay contexts, who the poet was or what period they lived in may be beyond your ability to comment on, if you don t know anything about the biography of the poet. There may be some clues in the poem itself about its context if it refers to specifi c people or events, but the poet may be referring to the distant past or even looking into the future (as Dawe does to some extent in A Double Haunting ). Whether these things should even be relevant is a controversial issue. A very influential group of critics in the twentieth century who came to be identified under the banner of New Criticism even suggested that it was a flat-out mistake or fallacy to think that the identity of the author was relevant to the way we read a work of literature. (They called this the intentional fallacy, referring to the intentions of the author.) All that mattered, they suggested, were the words on the page; we could figure out what they meant through what is known as close reading, without reference to historical or biographical details. There is clearly some value in focusing on the work itself and not getting too bogged down in the identity of the writer. (Witness all the conspiracy theories about who really wrote the works of Shakespeare, which seem to dismiss the wonderful poems and plays except as a sort of code with clues to the real identity of the author. Bill Bryson, in his book Shakespeare: The World as Stage (HarperCollins, 2007), makes a very clear case against these theories, if you really want to explore this issue, and if you want more details there is also James Shapiro s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Simon & Schuster, 2010).) However, being aware of the social and historical contexts in which a work was written clearly does add something to our understanding of it. Knowing that Shakespeare lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and wrote his sonnets within a tradition of courtly love poetry that operated within certain conventions helps us to understand something of his work. 14 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

16 1 Similarly, it helps us get some idea of the context of Bruce Dawe s work if we know that he started writing poetry in the 1950s. A Double Haunting was written in 1969, and we can see from the poem itself, with its references to plexiglass (a kind of transparent plastic) and oil slicks that it couldn t have been written by Shakespeare. The environmental concerns that Dawe expresses in the poem, with its references to humans fouling the oceans and atmosphere, were starting to take hold in Australia and elsewhere around the world at this time. The Australian Conservation Foundation came into being in the mid-1960s and the Keep Australia Beautiful organisation was founded in the year this poem was written. The sense that we have been despoiling our environment has a long tradition in poetry. It goes back to at least the Industrial Revolution: William Blake refers to dark Satanic mills blighting England s green & pleasant Land in his poem commonly known as Jerusalem, which dates from The environmental movement was becoming a much more widespread phenomenon when Dawe wrote A Double Haunting though, and thanks to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States there was a growing sense that humans would manage to wipe themselves off the face of the earth. The reference to the vapour trails scrawling their Omega in the sky evokes the idea of an apocalypse, as Omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet and therefore symbolises an ending. The effect of industry on the environment has long been a subject for poets. 1 Getting started 15

17 Look closer 1 The general critical consensus is that most of Shakespeare s sonnets, including Sonnet 18, are addressed to a young man. Does knowing that it seems to be about one man addressing another man change your interpretation of the poem? Should it? 2 Is there anything about Sonnet 18 that locates it in a historical period? What? 3 You should be wary of equating the poet with the speaker in the poem. Poets are perfectly capable of creating characters that speak their words, and those characters can be of a different sex from that of their author. Do you think we can identify the voice in the sonnet as Shakespeare s own, though? 16 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

18 1 Bringing it all together The final chapter of this book will focus on tying together the disparate elements we have looked at so far: the imagery, sound devices, structure, mood, theme and authorial and historical contexts for each poem. This will be done with specific tasks in mind and will provide a range of sample responses. When bringing together all the elements in a poem you will need to be selective, as it won t usually be feasible to write about everything. Even the shortest poem can generate a wealth of material. Experience has shown that students can write pages of analysis of even a two-line poem by Ezra Pound ( In a Station of the Metro ). What you choose to include and exclude will depend on the task you have been given. Bear in mind that even if a question doesn t explicitly ask you to address technical elements such as imagery and sound devices, these can still be relevant to your response. Equally, don t feel obliged to mention absolutely everything that you can think of. If you can t think why Shakespeare rhymes shines with declines in Sonnet 18, then don t bother mentioning that he does. Teachers will want you to make the connection to the meaning of the poem if you re going to mention a technique. Look closer 1 Look back over the preceding sections. For Sonnet 18 rank the elements of imagery, sound devices, poetic form/structure, mood and theme and authorial and historical contexts in order of importance from 1 (for most important) to 5 (for least important). Explain why you ranked them this way. 2 Now do the same for A Double Haunting, again explaining your rankings. 3 Did your rankings differ for the two poems? For example, did you think that poetic form/structure was most important for A Double Haunting but mood and theme were most important for Sonnet 18? If your rankings differed, why do you think this was the case? 1 Getting started 17

19 FeatureS of this BooK Questions and activities Each chapter will feature poems selected from the most commonly taught poets in schools. As well as general analysis based on the focus of each chapter, the poems will be followed by a Look closer section, as you ve already seen in this chapter. These questions aim to get you thinking about particular aspects of the poems and to get you started in developing your own interpretations. There will also be activities that ask you to manipulate the poems in particular ways in order to understand them better. Here s one for you to do now: AcTIVITY 1.1 Rewrite Shakespeare s Sonnet 18 in modern prose. That is, take it out of its sonnet form and remove the line breaks. Get rid of words like thee and replace them with modern terminology ( you in this case). You re doing a kind of translation here and showing that you can put Shakespeare s argument in the poem into your own words. This can be a useful exercise for you to do with any older poem you are studying, just to check your understanding of it. It s also worth doing with more modern poems, as it is not only archaic language that can make a poem tricky to understand. Skill building This section will feature essay-related tasks that will prepare you to embark on a full essay. Let s start now with one of the most important skills that you need to master when it comes to analysing poetry: annotating a poem. First, here are my annotations on A Double Haunting, building on some of the points that have been made earlier in this chapter. Annotations should be brief and should highlight areas that you could potentially explore in more depth in an essay. You should do as many annotations as you can. You may choose not to pursue some of the points you identify, but it s a kind of brainstorming to get you thinking about a poem. Your annotations may be speculative and exploratory, showing some uncertainty about the poem, but don t simply ask questions or put question marks down. You should come up with possible answers to questions you have about the poem. 18 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

20 1 A Double Haunting Bruce Dawe Man will always be haunted by his world Though he should escape for a time by sealing himself In plexiglass abstractions, equipped with filtered air Pumped from underground purifiers, though he should Call green his enemy, inoculate his heart Against the virus of mutability, Quarter the ocean and atmosphere, fouling what s left With oil-slick and fumes excreta of his contempt Even before the wind changes, the tide returns him his folly, He will ache unexpectedly for the boyishness of plants, For rogue elephant grasses, the Yarra Bank crankiness Of trees, jungles to sweat in and out of, And the head-down happiness of beasts with their innocent loyalties. And the world, in its turn, for a time will be haunted by man Even after his vapour-trails have scrawled their Omega Over the evening heavens, kindly or gross His shadow will fall on the ground and the beasts in their browsing Tremble a moment remembering, the rivers and seas pause as they Dwindle to rivers and seas, the leaves and the vines Sigh in the simpler wind for the old touch of Latin And for men to push through them and set up a camp in the clearing. The second dash indicates a change of direction in the poem and the reference to the wind changing supports this. After all the talk of pollution, now Dawe highlights what we will miss after the destruction of the environment (our folly ). Dawe uses medical imagery in this line and the previous one with the words virus and inoculate, suggesting that we re afraid of change, of the processes of the natural world, where things live and die. The assonance of the i sound in the words in, simpler and wind is suggestive of the sound of the wind (a kind of onomatopoeia) and draws attention to the personification of the leaves and vines, which represent the natural world. They sigh at the memory of men pushing through them, the haunting reversed, contributing to the melancholy mood of the poem. Man is being used in the universal sense here (which may now strike readers as being sexist) to refer to humankind. World seems to refer to the natural world/environment. Haunting implies that something is dead, perhaps indicating that we have killed the natural environment. Dawe uses personification to highlight the endearing aspects of nature, giving human qualities of boyishness and crankiness to plants, grasses and trees. The internal rhyme of Bank and crank[iness] draws attention to this personification. Beasts (or animals) are mentioned for the first time in the final line of this stanza. They are described as innocent in their loyalties, perhaps indicating that even though some animals, like pets, are attached to humans, they are not responsible for destroying nature. Notice the shift from the suggestion that man will always be haunted by his world to the suggestion that in the reverse situation the world will be haunted by man only for a time. This suggests that nature is more enduring. Omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet and suggests an ending, in this case of the human race. The vapour trails imply planes and may possibly be suggesting a nuclear apocalypse, with the vapour trails coming from bombers dropping nuclear devices. Green symbolises nature. Dawe seems to be suggesting that nature is not really our enemy, but we sometimes characterise it in this way. Plexiglass is a plastic substance at odds with the natural world, and the abstractions also suggest an opposition to nature. Dawe returns to the beasts again, but instead of their being remembered they are now given the faculty of memory. The alliteration of the b sound in beasts and browsing emphasises their reappearance and there is a similar sound echo in tremble and remembering with the emb sound in the next line. 1 Getting started 19

21 AcTIVITY 1.2 Now do your own annotations for Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare, following the model that you ve just seen. You can use some of the information you ve read in this chapter for your annotations as well as your answers to the Look closer questions on the poem so far. Sample essays Each chapter after this one will feature an annotated sample essay showing how to approach different kinds of essay and exam tasks related to poetry. These will include essays that focus on the thematic aspects of the poems, essays that are based on detailed close readings of particular poems, comparative essays and creative essays. what your teacher wants Look out for the boxes in each chapter labelled What your teacher wants that explain the kinds of things that teachers are looking for when it comes to writing about poetry. 20 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

22 1 Did you know? A bit more light-hearted than the sections on the lives of the poets, these boxes will dispense unusual facts and anecdotes connected with poets and their poems. Different lenses Although more common at university level, some literary theory has been making its way into secondary schools in recent decades. The Different lenses sections will give you some idea about different theoretical approaches to poetry, such as feminist or postcolonial readings of poems. The poet s life The lives of particular poets (as well as the historical context they wrote their poems in) will be the particular focus of Chapter 6, but each chapter will highlight one poet and give you a brief biography of him or her. These biographical details may or may not be useful for particular essays you re writing, but they can help you to remember aspects of their poetry ( Which one was Keats again? Oh, that s right, he was the one that died young of tuberculosis and wrote those odes. And Yeats was the Irish guy with the strange mystical ideas. ) DIY poetry tools This book features analyses of a wide range of commonly taught poems, but there are many thousands of poems that are taught in schools, and what if the one you re studying isn t included in the book? The principles you learn from studying the included poems should be transferable, but this section of each chapter will give you a few approaches that you can try out with any poem. Read more Each chapter will end with an annotated bibliography that can guide you towards further reading, including other poems you may look out for as well as critical materials that can go into more depth on particular poets or aspects of poetry. Given the poems we looked at in this chapter, here is some further reading you can do on Shakespeare s sonnets and on Bruce Dawe s poetry. 1 Getting started 21

23 You can easily fi nd all of Shakespeare s sonnets online if you want to read more of them (and we ll look at a couple more in this book). The Shakespeare s Sonnets site contains the complete sonnets, with commentary on each one, and also includes the 1609 Quarto versions of each sonnet, so you can see the original spellings and punctuation: Books on the sonnets worth checking out include Shakespeare s Sonnets by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Oxford University Press, 2004). Edmondson and Wells are two of the foremost Shakespearean experts in the world and both work for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, of which Wells is the Chairman and Edmondson the Director of Education. The book provides information about the early and late publication of the sonnets, gives a history of the form and looks at the sonnets in relation to Shakespeare s life, among other topics. For a less conventional and somewhat provocative take on the sonnets, see Reading the Sonnets: A New Commentary by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber, 2010). Paterson is a poet himself and takes a strictly unacademic approach to the poems, treating them as new works rather than as stale and stuffy poems four centuries old. To fi nd out more about Bruce Dawe, a good place to start is the biography Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle by Stephany Steggall (Ginninderra Press, 2009), which looks at his life through his poetry. For a critical work that focuses on Dawe s poetry, there s Attuned to Alien Moonlight: The Poetry of Bruce Dawe by Dennis Haskell (University of Queensland Press, 2002). 22 POetrY remastered a practical guide for senior students

24 1 1 Getting started 23