How to Write an A* GCSE English Literature Poetry Response

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How to Write an A* GCSE English Literature Poetry Response

How to Write an A* GCSE English Literature Poetry Response

The Poetry Component of the GCSE Literature Paper

The poetry task is the second question on the GCSE English Literature exam paper. It is perhaps the more demanding of the tasks on the paper, because unlike the question on the prose, in this section you are being asked to compare four poems simultaneously throughout your answer.

In the exam you should spend one hour on this section of the paper.

Given the greater demand of the task, your response to the poetry is worth more marks than the response to the prose. In order to perform at the highest level on this paper, it is important that you develop a nuanced and sophisticated comparative written style. However, this is achievable if you adopt a systematic approach to ordering and writing your responses. It does, however, demand considerable practice prior to the final examination.

What is the Examiner looking for in a response to the Poetry?

The exam is designed to test your ability to do the following things:

·  Can you respond to the poems critically, in detail, and sensitively using textual evidence?

·  Can you explore language, structure and form contribute to the meaning of texts?

·  Can you compare the ways that ideas, themes and relationships are presented in the poems by selecting pertinent details from the texts?

In other words you need to:

Write a detailed and nuanced comparison of the poems considering how the language and form contribute to the overall meaning of the poems, and the relationships, themes and ideas that the poets are trying to present to the audience.

What is the Examiner looking for in an A* response to the Poetry?

An A* response is characterised by a conceptualised, insightful and imaginative approach to the texts that combines an analytical and exploratory use of detail in each poem individually with evaluative comparison across all of the four poems discussed in the answer.

Essentially, an A* response will set itself apart from the hundreds of other responses because it has an individual and unique approach that shows the writer has developed their own individual ideas about the texts. This approach is characterised by a confident engagement with the themes, ideas, relationships and technical construction of the poems. Equally, the writer of an A* response will show comparative skill; making links and cross referencing the poems using telling detail to form the basis of insightful comparisons between the poems.

The following are the specific requirements of an A* response:

·  A conceptualised and imaginative response to the themes, ideas, relationships of the poems;

·  Insightful exploration of the themes, ideas and relationships of the poems;

·  Sensitive and evaluative use of detail, integrated into the response to support the argument;

·  Evaluative comparison of language, structure and form and their effects on the reader;

·  Evaluative comparison of ideas, meanings and poet’s techniques.

At first this may appear daunting but with a ruthless and systematic approach it can be achieved. Essentially, the key to performing at this level is having your own ideas; if you can form your own opinions about each of the poems then you will be able to write this kind of essay. The real skill here is to marry the ideas that you have with a written style that allows you to showcase them in the examination. The former depends on you knowing the poems intimately; the latter on a ruthless determination to master the process outlined in the rest of this document.

What do each of the requirements mean in reality?

The following is an example of a typical poetry question set in the Literature exam:

Compare the ways that poets present death in Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney, The Affliction of Margaret by William Wordsworth and two other poems.

In order to meet the different requirements of an A* response you would expect a response on this title to take the kind of approach shown below under each criteria. The key difference between the examination and coursework essays is that in the examination you only have to ‘hit’ each criterion once throughout your essay.

·  A conceptualised approach to the themes, ideas and relationships of the poems

You might begin and end your response with some theoretical discussion of the concept in the title question. In the case of this question, the concept is death, therefore you might begin your essay in the following way:

The finality of death is presented in a range of ways throughout the poems in the Anthology; it forms a central concern of the poets and each one focuses on different aspects such that we might come to see the poems as exploring the process of death. That is, while in Mid-Term Break, Heaney centres the narrative of his poem on an the nature of grief – the longer term impact of a ‘death’ – conversely, Gillian Clarke’s The Field Mouse is concerned with the genocidal murder of a people during the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans during the 1990s. However, ironically, given the scale of Clarke’s deaths her poem is imbued with a sense of anonymity – it is more focussed on the concept rather than the event because we never see a death, but instead, the effect of its magnitude, in turn, this foregrounds Clarke’s attempt to locate her exploration of death as an abstract meditation on the concept itself. Another poet concerned with death as a concept is William Wordsworth in The Affliction of Margaret who presents the impact of a possible but unconfirmed death, in turn, the persona of the poem is forced to confront the uncertainty and guilt presented by a hypothetical bereavement. This forms an effective contrast with the reality of the death in Heaney’s poem, despite the lack of a death in The Affliction of Margaret, it is Heaney’s persona who confronts death in more detached and cold way. However, in the same way that both Heaney and Wordsworth focus on the impact of a death in the family, so too does Ben Jonson in On My First Sonne. However, Jonson’s approach is much more concerned with the longer-term effect of death, of how a man recovers from not just the death of his son, but his own metaphorical death; that is, the son that defined his role as father has died and so too the purpose of the persona’s life.

Why is this conceptualised?

·  It engages with the ‘death’ as an idea rather than just an event that happens;

·  It deconstructs the idea of death and discusses specific elements or characteristics of death;

·  It understands that ‘death’ is an idea the poets use as a theme that is explored through the events, characters and relationships of the poem.

Also note how the writer establishes a comparative tone from the outset – this is a real positive because already the examiner is aware that this essay has comparison at its centre.

·  Insightful Exploration of Themes, Ideas and Relationships of the Poem

In order to ‘hit’ this criterion you need to show that you can not only identify what the different themes, ideas and relationships are, but instead, that you can consider the different possible meanings that the poet is trying to convey. So for example, at some point you would want a passage that shows this kind of exploration:

The arrangement of Mid-Term Break and The Field Mouse is central to the way that both poets present the concept of death. Mid-Term Break adopts a rigid three-line stanza structure which is counter pointed in the final single line that is intended to enhance the horror of the child’s death. However, Clarke sustains the regularity of her stanzas throughout in order to convey the powerlessness of the victims of war who are at the mercy of the unbreakable horror of war. In turn, the regularity of Mid-Term Break may be representative of the strong exterior the persona feels compelled to uphold in order to support his father who he meets ‘crying’ on his arrival. However, the final line, ‘a four foot box, a foot for every year’ transposes the focus of the poem from the external to the internal; that is, into the mind of the persona who is struck by the horror of a wasted life whose meagre years are presented by the morbid symbol of the coffin in which his brother lies. However, undermining the persona’s rigid outward appearance, and foreshadowing the final moment of realisation at the end of the poem, is the enjambment that runs between stanzas three, four and five. While attempting to maintain the dignity and stoicism exhibited by men like ‘Big Jim Evans’ who euphemistically characterise the death as a ‘hard blow’, the enjambment hints at a young boy projecting an outward appearance of strength but internally struggling to repress the chaotic and unpredictable feelings of an incomprehensible death. However, whereas Heaney is concerned with a persona trying to repress the feelings brought about by a death that defies reason; Clarke’s poem is about how death can be ignored and rationalised. The Field Mouse’s stanzas of equal length allude to the regularity of life beyond the place of death in the countries where people are not affected by the events of the ‘radio’s terrible news’. The idea of distance, evoked by the idea of people receiving the news over the radio – as opposed to first-hand – is crucial because it creates the sense of how war – and by definition, death – is a concept that the outside world can accept at a distance, while to the people who suffer its wrath it is an overwhelming presence of brutality. This marks a key contrast between the two poems: Heaney presenting a poem about a death that we all find futile and tragic; while Clarke presents a death that is negated by those to whom it does not reach, this is a central part of the tragedy of the Balkans genocide to which Clarke might be referring: thousands of people were ethnically cleansed while the rest of the world looked on indifferently. The stanza structure of both poems enhances the

Why is the insightful and exploratory?

·  It clearly understands possible layers of meaning in relation to the concept of death;

·  It doesn’t just identify possible meanings, it develops on them, using textual detail to draw out the ideas to their logical conclusions – in other words it explores the ideas;

·  It draws its conclusions from a close understanding of the text – as shown by the references to specific detail in the poems – and is therefore sustainable.

Notice that there is a balance here between close analytical reading of each poem and then some important comparative remarks that again further the sense that this is – at its centre – a comparison. Another important feature to note is the way that detail or quotations are embedded into the body of the argument and that the paragraph isn’t punctuated by long, overwhelming quotations.

The above passage would also get maximum credit for the final three criteria:

·  Sensitive and evaluative use of detail, integrated into the response to support the argument

You will notice that in order to support the points being made, the writer has used key details – the specific reference to the stoicism of Big Jim in Mid-Term Break or the radio in The Field Mouse – which are integrated or embedded into the body of the argument. The passage would be rewarded for sensitive and evaluative use of detail because the details used by the writer are used to make an insightful comment about death in the poems – for example, that death in Mid-Term Break creates conflicting emotions in people, which have to be repressed or controlled in someway dependent on other people. This then becomes an evaluative comment because of the way that the writer then comments on how the persona is ‘projecting an outward appearance’ of stoicism, showing that they understand that there is a duality of purpose in Heaney’s presentation of the poem; he isn’t simply showing the boy is trying to act like the men around him, but instead, he is being forced into a much more complex dilemma about how to deal with grief.

·  Evaluative comparison of language, structure and form and their effects on the reader;

The central point of this paragraph is concerned with how form and structure help us to derive the key thematic ideas presented by the poets. The writer is comparing the way that the poets use the length and construction of stanzas to convey meaning – essentially, an issue of poetic form – and therefore immediately they get credit for showing that they understand that this is a crucial feature of poetic craft. However, they then develop this into an evaluative comparison by explaining why each poem adopts its stanza structure. In order to do this, the writer explains the effects of each one in terms of the meaning that it conveys:

In turn, the regularity of Mid-Term Break may be representative of the strong exterior the persona feels compelled to uphold in order to support his father who he meets ‘crying’ on his arrival. However, the final line, ‘a four foot box, a foot for every year’ transposes the focus of the poem from the external to the internal; that is, into the mind of the persona who is struck by the horror of a wasted life whose meagre years are presented by the morbid symbol of the coffin in which his brother lies

and

The Field Mouse’s stanzas of equal length allude to the regularity of life beyond the place of death in the countries where people are not affected by the events of the ‘radio’s terrible news’. The idea of distance, evoked by the idea of people receiving the news over the radio – as opposed to first-hand – is crucial because it creates the sense of how war – and by definition, death – is a concept that the outside world can accept at a distance, while to the people who suffer its wrath it is an overwhelming presence of brutality.