Writing about structural turning points for GCSE English Literature

Read the article or watch the video: Structural turning points

In the last post, we looked at some ways in which writers open poems, plays and novels. Today, we’re going to focus on how writers build up to those crucial turning points. We’ll look at how they play with our expectations and how they trick us when we least expect it.

Openings are generally designed to establish things. They set out situations and problems. They introduce characters. They set their stall. What’s curious about openings is why the writer has chosen to start at that specific point in time or with that specific character. We might consider what themes they establish and what expectations they plant as tiny seeds in our minds.

Let’s quickly recap with Charles Dickens’ GCSE perennial A Christmas Carol.

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Why start with Marley? Who even is Marley? Why is he dead ‘to begin with’? When you know the rest of the story – about Ebeneezer Scrooge – you might well wonder why Dickens starts with this consideration of death. Death, after all, runs all the way through the novella. We might also be thinking about death not being an ending. After all, Marley was dead ‘to begin with’. Of all the places Dickens could have started, he starts with Marley’s death. Not Marley alive. Not Marley and Scrooge as young business partners. Not Marley on his deathbed telling Scrooge not to be so humbug. Actually, none of those would work as a plot device. Marley has to be dead because it’s only in the afterlife that he realises what a miserable old sinner he was and comes back to tell Scrooge to mend his ways unless he wants the same fate. But it also sets up the big ideas: life, death, how we live, how we behave… and it prepares us to think that this is a book about death not being an end to things.

So openings establish. They provide foundations. They cast on stitches on the great knitting needles of the plot.

And turning points deviate. They diverge. They take us in unexpected directions. Let’s look at Romeo and Juliet. We’ve had the spoiler alert. The prologue has spilled all the beans. If we didn’t know before, we do by the end of that first speech. Romeo and Juliet are going to ‘take their life’. That’s it. That’s the play. Their death ends their parents’ strife. There’s your plot. Then we have an establishing scene where all the Capulets and Montagues are just waiting for the tiniest transgression to start scrapping again… Here we’ve got Shakespeare establishing this bloody and tinder-like backdrop just waiting to explode. Escalus comes along and puts a lid on it with a show of force: ‘on pain of death’ for anyone who threatens the peace. Now there’s a lovely seed being sown. If Escalus doesn’t issue that ‘pain of death’ threat to keep the peace, well, when we’ve got all the killing in the middle, there’d be less reason for us to suspect Romeo might be the one with the death penalty hanging over his head. When Escalus later asks: ‘who are the vile beginners of this fray?’, we know full well what’s coming. In fact, it’s a shock when he accepts banishment as a punishment for Romeo instead.

So we know the purpose of the opening. That’s fine. Establish a fragile peace over a town likely to erupt like Vesuvius at any point. And then, here comes Romeo, mooning about. Benvolio couldn’t give us any more clues that Romeo is mooning about, but it’s still playing with our expectations. We expect it to be Juliet that he’s in love with. Not only that, Shakespeare teases us. He drags it out for some several hundred lines until Benvolio finally reveals that it’s Rosaline. Wait, what?! First-time audiences are going to have their minds blown by that. Not Juliet?

So why tell us all this about Rosaline? Well… one theory is that it shows how fickle Romeo is and how Juliet is absolutely right to pin him down into marriage. Another might be that it shows how infatuation and love are not alike and when true love hits, as it does in just twenty lines of text, THEN you know what you felt before was nothing special at all.

So turning points often come with these pivotal moments or decisions where the destiny of the characters, the narrative or the idea changes forever.

We can think of them happening in two ways: gradually or suddenly.

Romeo meets Juliet and in 20 lines, bam, star-crossed lovers. Sudden turning point.

Wordsworth’s Stealing the Boat? Well that’s a gradual turning point that sits over him for days.

An Inspector Calls? Turning point after turning point there! Sudden revelation after sudden revelation. Is there anything as monumental as the line where Sybil Birling realises she’s caused the death of her own grandchild? And her reaction to this knowledge? Priestley using the Inspector to gradually, gradually, gradually build up to a ‘bam’ of a line where we suddenly realise – as do the other characters – the involvement of yet another member of the cast in the death of the girl known as Eva Smith. Now I find An Inspector Calls to be a tub-thumping morbid tale with little hope in it, but you can’t fault Priestley for dramatic turning point after dramatic turning point. Wait, what? The Inspector isn’t an inspector? What?! Wait, what? Another inspector is now on his way around?! What?! I think it’s easy to overlook in class just how Priestley sets us up to think one thing and then completely pulls the rug out from under us.

I guess from the selection of poems at GCSE, Browning’s are my favourite with the turning point. Porphyria’s Lover… Guy tells us about this woman who loves him, that she was ‘perfectly good and pure’. Just when you’re thinking it’s a lovely and delightful story of Man Meets Woman, Lives Happily Ever After, then he ‘finds a thing to do’ in the very next line, and takes her hair before strangling her with it. You’re all, ‘Awwww, cute love story!’ and then, ‘Wait, he did what now?!’

If you’re a teacher by the way (yes, I know you read it too – you’re welcome here!), do a sentence-by-sentence reveal for Porphyria’s lover stopping at each point to discuss reader responses and what your students expect to happen. I guarantee that, if none of them know the tale at all, they absolutely will not expect him in one line wondering what to do and the next saying he strangled her.

Turning points are where we see the writer’s craft most obviously. We suspend our disbelief as they paint a world for us. We go along with their gradual establishing of characters as set to succeed or fail. They plant seeds that germinate in our minds in dark corners as we read. And at the turning point, we realise we’re right, getting that burst of smugness and satisfaction of knowing we had it right all along. Or we realise we’ve been duped – and like the audience in a magic trick, it is at once delicious and duplicitous, tantalising us to work out how they pulled it off.

There are only two books I can recall that real feeling of shock when my expectations were well and truly dashed. One is Michael Cox’s delightful novel The Meaning of Night… I won’t tell you where and why I gasped, but there are so many delightful teasings in that modern Gothic that it’s specifically worth mentioning. And the other is Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which did not please me in the same way at all and I ended feeling deceived and cheated. I know I need to re-read it to see if there’s any virtue at all in the choice the main character made, but suffice to say, one book made me gasp with joy and the other with disappointment.

Writing is a game between writer and reader. They play with us, toy with us, tease us. We enter into the relationship as a willing partner, desperate to be tantalised and entertained. The turning points are where they take all our expectations and either validate them or destroy them. It’s the turning points where I think we can feel the most pleasure in the glamorous net that the writer has spun out.

Truth be told, there are many moments that contribute to the direction of a text. Any one of them is worth exploring as to how the writer manipulates our expectations. After these moments, we can look back at earlier moments and identify just where we were misled, and just how.

Writing about structure for GCSE English Literature

For those who prefer watching or listening to reading

Many of you will be arriving here no doubt wondering what you’re supposed to write about when you’re considering the structure of a text. That text may be a poem, a play or even an entire novel. For many, structure remains the hardest thing to write about if you don’t have a good understanding of what it is. Let’s face it: we’ve been thinking about what words mean since the first time we asked our parents to explain rude words they’d used. We’ve discussed meaning and word use right from the very beginning of our education.

That can leave us feeling less confident when it comes to talking about structure.

So what even is structure?

At a very simple level, it can just mean the beginning, the middle and the end.

All we need to think about is the opening, a change in direction and how the text ends. If we’re thinking about Macbeth, why does Shakespeare start with the opening scene with the witches? I mean, he can start anywhere he likes. He could have started with the Macbeths eating their breakfast on the day before the battle. He could have started with a battle scene. He could have repurposed Henry V, and had a rousing speech from Macbeth as he charges into battle. He could have started with a prologue, like he does in Romeo and Juliet, explaining what will happen and giving us some kind of moral lesson to learn.

None of those choices made the cut. We start with the weird sisters and them telling us they’re going to meet with Macbeth. Then we have a scene change to Duncan off the battlefield. Then we finally meet Macbeth. Why do it in that order?

Those are questions related to the structure of the text: how the narrative order roles out.

We can consider why the writer changes scene, setting or character then.

And we can consider all the various turning points. There are hundreds of turning points in texts. Even short poems can have turning points. If we consider Ozymandias, we’ve got a long description in the middle of the ‘shattered visage’ and the pedestal, only for that ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ to shift into that three-word fragment on the next line: ‘Nothing besides remains.’

Or if we take Wordsworth’s Stealing the Boat… ‘But’ can often mark the arrival of a turning point, yet Wordsworth is about to do something really interesting. It’s been all ‘glittering’ and ‘sparkling’ and ‘skies’ until…

When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark, –
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.

Look at all those ‘ands’ at the beginning of the line. You think that’s an accident? Why connect all his ideas with ‘and’? Why never have a clear turning point? Even the ‘but’ comes without a clear and defined break. Why it’s almost as if that peak kept on growing and growing and growing and growing and didn’t stop. You’re not telling me that the great master of poetry, Wordsworth no less, was so limited in his linguistic prowess that he couldn’t think of any other way to join his ideas without sticking a great big ‘and’ at the beginning of five lines. Why not have a full stop after ‘serious mood’? Why it’s almost like the feeling grew and grew in Wordsworth without a clearly defined moment where he felt this ‘blank desertion’. As he says, it crept up on him with a ‘dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being’ over ‘many days’. Isn’t it wonderfully appropriate that he uses a semi-colon rather than a full-stop, and that there’s no clearly defined moment of realisation where he has an epiphany that the natural world can be pretty terrifying? Hats off to you, Mr Wordsworth, hats off indeed!

One of the biggest questions we can start with is WHY START HERE and LIKE THIS?

Of all the places you could have started, why is this the place you started?

Why does Macbeth start with the weird sisters?

Why does Romeo and Juliet start with a prologue without a huge great spoiler alert?

Why does The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde start with a tediously yawnsome story about a very boring lawyer and a door? You’re about to unleash a story on us about a man who releases his very inner monster and you start with: ‘Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.’

Really? You’re going to start off this macabre tale with a dusty, dreary old bloke?

Why does Ozymandias start by telling us the poet met some weird bloke he didn’t even know who stopped him in the street to tell him a story about a statue in the desert that had fallen apart?

You can get so much out of the opening of stories. Why does Pride and Prejudice start with the outrageous statement that: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ ??

Yet Emma starts with: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’

And Northanger Abbey starts with: ‘No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.  Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.’

So Pride and Prejudice starts with the wonderfully delicious notion that we many have a number of rich single men who will go on, in the course of the novel, to meet their wives, and Emma starts with the author telling us how her central character had pretty much everything, yet Northanger Abbey starts by telling us that her main character is not cut out to be the heroine, according to anyone who knew her. Already, within one line, we’ve got three very different stories proposed. All of these come back to what we expect from these stories.

So what do we expect?

A story where some rich guys meet wives…

A story where we’re convinced the ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ main character will probably find a number of things to ‘distress or vex her’ because a story that just told us how marvellous her life was, with the ‘best blessings of existence’ would be as tedious as reading about supermodels and their wonderfully perfect lives and husbands and babies. What we want to see, more than anything, is a story where a person who has a ‘comfortable home and happy disposition’ actually has some things to test her…

A story where a very unexpected and possibly very un-heroic main character actually does something pretty heroic and daring… It’s the story of an underdog and we’re already rooting for her, because unlike Emma, she’s not got anything in life to favour her.

If you do nothing else when thinking about the poems, the novels and the plays that you are studying, ask yourself why the writer chose to open as they did – of all the myriad ways they could have started their writing. It’s not meaningless.

We don’t have to simply think about the ideas and the content – we can think about what the writer is doing. For instance, in Pride and Prejudice, Austen starts with what sounds like an aphorism – a truth, a statement of the blindingly obvious. And then we might to start thinking, is it? Is it really true that single rich guys are absolutely desperate for wives? In Emma, she starts with some pretty selective description of her main character and her life. It’s like a perfectly curated Instagram life. Yet in Northanger Abbey, she starts with some authorial commentary telling us what people thought about the main character and why.

Then we can start to think about why the writer starts in these ways. Aren’t we surely going to be putting Austen’s aphorism about rich, single men to the test? Are we going to get behind the perfectly curated Instagram life of Emma Woodhouse and realise it’s not as perfect as it looks? Are we going to see people changing their minds about Catherine Morland and coming to appreciate her as something a little more than ordinary?

As you can see, we can consider the content of the opening, asking ourselves why the writer starts with this detail, and we can also consider the way in which the writer opens their text and what that method helps them do.

In the next post, I’ll look at how you can write sensibly about these things and the types of things you might be able to say in the exam. We’ll also go on to look at turning points, and how writers build up to those, and then we’ll look at why writers end where they do.

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An analysis of the context, form and structure of Poppies by Jane Weir

This poem looks at a female perspective on conflict, and as such, it offers us our first female voice in the ‘Power and Conflict’ section of AQA’s GCSE English Literature poetry anthology. We see conflict from a mother’s perspective, a position that is both objective, looking on, and subjectively involved. The poet takes on the persona of a mother -it is not important whether she’s writing in character, or writing about her own experiences. It seems ostensibly about a child leaving for school, not a soldier leaving to fight, with the “yellow bias” on the “blazer” which gives it more in common with Cecil Day Lewis’s poem Walking Away in the ‘Love and Relationships’ section of the anthology. She says she deliberately left out any specific war: “after all, there are lots of wars”, which makes it relevant to whichever war – all wars – and she says she was deliberately thinking about mothers, including Susan Owen, Wilfred Owen’s mother. It shows you don’t have to be directly involved in conflict for it to affect you. 

So, when considering the form… When I think about the form of the poem, I think about the following:

Form

How it’s set out on the page; line length, syllables, rhythm (metre) rhyme, what words are on what line, number of lines, sonnet, couplets, three lines, quatrains, regularity of the number of lines in a verse/stanza, capitals (or lack of) main punctuation at the end of lines or stanzas (, . , .  / , , , . / ; : ; . )  phrase splits and the way the words fall on each line, which ideas are linked within the line or stanza and which are separate, caesura, enjambment.

Form is what makes it a poem and not prose. Why does it look the way it does? What decisions has the poet made about what he has put on one line and what on another? Why this form?

So, Poppies… what do we notice this form? What effects might it have on the reader? 

The poem is written in a very natural way. It’s almost like the line breaks are artificial and just there to make it look like a poem. If you remove the line breaks, it’s very hard to know where they would go, and it works well as a piece of prose. In those ways, it just slices the text up to make it look like a poem, without it having much by way of purposeful effect. It makes use of caesura and enjambment, but not for any particularly dramatic effect like Seamus Heaney or Simon Armitage do. It does beg the question about why she does this. For instance, why this: 

Three days before Armistice Sunday
and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves. Before you left,
I pinned one onto your lapel…

And not this:

Three days before Armistice Sunday
and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves.
Before you left, I pinned one onto your lapel…

When you aren’t governed by where you put the words, why leave that “Before you left” dangling at the end of the line, hanging after the caesura?

For me, I think there are several effects worth considering. The first is that it makes the form seem almost redundant and accidental, like it doesn’t matter. That’s fine, of course. The form can be just a blank plate to serve words up on, and in the same ways as I discussed in the form of Remains, it could just be a meaningless form on which to serve ideas.

But I don’t think so.

Perhaps it also shows a bit of carelessness. Typesetters in printers are responsible for making the print aesthetically pleasing. They make sure in novels that the justified text doesn’t have massive gaps between words, or if there is hyphenation to make the text nicely justified that the hyphens fall neatly. I’ll justify this paragraph and you can see what I mean.

Perhaps it also shows a bit of carelessness. Typesetters in printers are responsible for making the print aesthetically pleasing. They make sure in novels that the justified text doesn’t have massive gaps between words, or if there is hyphenation to make the text nicely justified that the hyphens fall neatly. I’ll justify this paragraph and you can see what I mean.

But this is not “neat” book justification, just poor computer justification. The typesetter will take much more care than I have over the space between words and making sure the space is exactly even without huge gaps between the words. Poppies seems it’s been arranged by a sloppy typesetter, or a computer algorithm, careless and unartistic. Functional.

In other ways, it could be much more purposeful – when you don’t stick to the ‘natural’ line breaks and you split sentences, use plenty of enjambment and caesura, you end up with something that is quite fragmented and disjointed, with unnatural pauses and hesitations in places you wouldn’t normally find them. For me, this causes the poem to ‘catch’ in strange places, like our breath catches and our sentences jar when we are upset and trying not to show it. We have that little ‘catch’ in a mother’s breath when she says, “Before you left,” where the line break adds weight to that comma pause. If you agree with me about this being the effect, it certainly does seem to catch and jar there.

She breaks down a noun phrase too in the first stanza, “disrupting a blockade/of yellow bias” – when you disrupt a noun phrase with a line break and you’ve even got the word “disrupting” in there, the enjambment and caesura seem much more purposeful.

Again, we have the catch and jar in her voice in stanza two, with the “shirt’s/upturned collar” and how she “steeled the softening/of [her] face” which I think seems to support the notion that the fragmenting, enjambment and caesura are indeed purposeful rather than just being sloppy about what words go where. She is a woman hardening herself so as not to give her emotions away, and the disjointed nature of some of those details makes it seem very much as if she has to stop a second to “steel” herself and gain control over her emotions.

Stanza two runs into stanza three, just like her words…

All my words
flattened, rolled, turned into felt,

slowly melting.

Here the lines do exactly what the words do, slowly melt into one another, adding to that kind of jumbled, formless effect, drifting from line to line before regaining a little compsure. Weir uses the final words at the end of those first lines in stanza three to add emphasis, to leave them hanging a moment for you to think about.

We land on “threw” which becomes so much more dynamic as a result of that line break pause that follows on the page. We do the same with “overflowing” and “a split second”. When we get to line five in that stanza with the full stop at the end, the word “intoxicated” is given so much more emphasis because of it. These are things I’ll discuss and consider further when thinking about the language of the poem.

By the time we get to the run-on lines of the final lines in stanza three, the words drift once more over the lines, just like the bird and the stitching. There’s a freedom and fluidity there which is not constrained by the line breaks or the sense of the lines. The rhyme of “tree… me… busy” also helps these lines speed up and run on into the next, picking up pace. They’re easier to read and more fluid.

The form in the last stanza is more assured. There are fewer unnatural breaks – sometimes verbs split from their object in “traced/the inscriptions” and “hoping to hear/your playground voice” (okay, split from its second object in that, since “to hear” is the first object) but it feels less disjointed than the earlier stanzas, like the poet has found her words and is no longer hesitating over them.

When we think about the stanza breaks, we are also asked to contemplate the structure and organisation of the poem, as well as the voice, tense and tone.

When I think about structure, I think about the following:

This explores how the ideas are organised and sequenced, viewpoint/perspective (third person? First person?) TiP ToP – Time Place Topic Person – shifts? Shift in time? Place? Why are the ideas in this order? External actions (happenings) vs internal thoughts? Circular structure? Beginning, middle, end? How does the title weave through the poem? Does the ending link back or develop from the opening?

Structure is the arrangement and sequence of the ideas, as well as some other aspects. I ask myself why here and not there?

We have four ‘paragraphs’ rather than stanzas, per se. Much of the reasoning behind these seems to fall into the domain of structure and organisation, since they seem to have rough ‘topics’ or ideas. The first is about Poppies in themselves. The second is about the mother’s attempts to care for her child and her final reflections before her child leaves. I’ll refer to the child as ‘he’ by the way, only because there is no real indication of whether it is a boy or a girl, only, perhaps the ‘gelled blackthorns’ of the hair, although girls can of course have a short haircut and wear gel. It could be a male or a female child, of course. I shan’t comment on my own innate sexism that the child ‘must be’ a boy since the poem is about conflict and seems to be set with a backdrop of war.

The poem opens with a mother who is reminiscing about a moment when she pinned a poppy to her child’s lapel, and it ends with an impromptu visit to the war memorial where the mother comes into the present moment. It is all written in the past tense, making it more reflective than a present-tense moment: it is a narrated account of internal conflict, of a mother caring for her child, setting them free and then the anxiety and worry that plague her having done so, as she tries to catch a last remnant of her child in the playground.

The first person narration is ambiguous. We do not know whether it is Jane Weir herself or a persona that she has adopted. It could well be some other mother, or it could be her. The first person narration allows us to see her internal conflict more clearly than an external viewpoint would have done: we get to see the inner workings of her thoughts.

In the next post, I will explore the way Jane Weir uses language and imagery in Poppies to create a moment of tension and conflict.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology or GCSE English revision, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

An Analysis of the language and imagery in Remains by Simon Armitage

In the last post, I looked at the context, form and structure in Simon Armitage’s poem Remains which is in AQA’s GCSE English Literature ‘Power and Conflict’ Anthology. I’ll pick up on some of those features once again as we look at language and imagery, as language is not divorced from form and structure, but the two work together.

I’ve already explored the start of the poem with the words, “On another occasion,” which acts as a sort of unmentioned exophoric reference to other ‘occasions’ that the persona in the poem has spoken or written about. It sounds like oral history, as I also said before, and it acts as a sort of marker that makes it clear that the events that happen in the poem are part of a series or sequence, or that they are nothing out of the ordinary. It just sounds like he is about to tell us some very matter-of-fact, routine, mundane, everyday sort of event. What comes is very much a surprise following this very conversational and banal phrase. It’s a very ordinary, unsurprising opening. It very much is in keeping with that four-line regular, humdrum verse and the unrhymed blank verse. Conversational and ordinary.

I’ve also already talked about the use of the present tense, which also gives it a conversational feel, but also makes it feel very much as if the persona is reliving the event as much as he is retelling it. It is very much the here-and-now for him. Sometimes the present tense is just a way we talk: it’s just a feature of spontaneous spoken English when we’re narrating a story – a way that we make it vivid. “I see this guy walking towards me and I’m all ‘come on, then!’ and just thinking ‘bring it on, mate. Bring it on!'” So that could be one thing Armitage is doing – making it sound like spontaneous spoken English.

Another thing he could be doing is using it to show how, for the soldier, the event is very much ‘now’ – the effect of which is to show how real and current this event is for the soldier, something that he is reliving and something he is unable to move on from. This very much fits with the notion of post-traumatic stress, that the person suffering from it feels like they can’t put the event behind them and move on from it: they are constantly reliving it.

Another way we could look at that present tense is that it makes this soldier, and this event, something that is current – an event that will never date. There will always be incidents like this in some war zone of some country or other. It makes it now. Wilfred Owen does the same thing in Exposure.

Again, no reason it can’t be doing all three things.

It has a very simple colloquial register to it as well, with the “sent out” and “tackle”. It’s a passive construction of a sort. They are “sent”. We have no idea who is sending them or why. This helps us understand that, like the soldiers in Owen’s poem and the soldiers in The Charging of the Light Brigade, they are not really clear on the reasons why. Theirs is not to reason why, indeed. We also have the plural inclusive “we” which could refer to a large number or a small number. We don’t know who this “we” is. Couple that with the present tense and you’ve got a similar voice and tense to Exposure that generalises it, makes it apply to all soldiers, any soldier, and to all wars, any war.

The word “tackle” is kind of innocuous. It’s reminiscent of a football match. Again, it’s colloquial. It sounds as if dealing with the looting should be easy: an everyday occurrence for the soldiers. Looting in itself is also a kind of petty euphemism. Looting means to steal, particularly during a war or riot. In the past, armies who’d laid siege to a city would loot and pillage, not that I am okay with that kind of practice; it implies opportunistic thievery rather than something downright criminal. Not to underplay it, but they aren’t cutting the heads off babies if they’re looting.

There are plenty of other more colloquial terms in the poem, and we catch one in the next line as well, the looter “legs it”. The verse ends with a contemplation as to whether he is armed, “probably armed, possibly not.” The parallel construction shows the weighing up the soldiers have to do in the instant. You’ve also got an interesting thing with the rhythm here: “POSS-i/bly ARMED,/ PROBab/ly NOT.” where we have a trochee followed by an iamb, repeated twice. It gives it a strong rhythm that seems to give it a bit of speed – not unlike the rhythm in The Charge of the Light Brigade. I think it seems to speed the verse up, both towards the inevitable “remains” and also at that moment, emphasising the spur-of-the-moment choices they have to make.

As we move into verse two, we have the “well” which is so indicative of colloquial spontaneous spoken English, adding to that effect that this is an oral history. Some of the details have become blurred; he can’t remember who he was with. Still, we have that strong rhythmic momentum, “and SOMEbody else and SOMEbody else” which drives us on and shows the confusion of the moment. The enjambment also runs the line on, increasing momentum, as does the lack of punctuation. We speed on through the three lines to the “open fire”, which comes as a complete shock – the “are of the same mind” has kind of foxed us, because we had no idea what they were up to.

There’s a real emphasis on three here, “me and somebody else and somebody else”, “all three of us open fire,” and “three of a kind all letting fly”.  I don’t know why this is. I can tell you the symbolism of three in itself, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the importance of this number as a religious digit, but that doesn’t seem to sit with me. I really have no explanation at all why this number is so important to him.

This second verse runs on into the next courtesy of the enjambed line leaving the “and I swear” hanging there, wondering what it is he is about to swear. The moment goes into slow motion as he recounts every single detail, the bullets. There’s a bizarre turn of phrase with “rips through his life”, which I could only really find references for that relate to this poem… it’s not a usual expression by any stretch of the imagination. The alliteration on the r in “round” and “rips” also echoes the sound of the machine gun fire. The dash at the end of the line carries us on into the next, the emphasis on “I see” which is now repeated a second time, focusing us on the fact that the unnamed persona in the poem is reliving this, moment by moment, but in some kind of glorious technicolour movie style – he couldn’t possibly have seen every bullet rip through the looter, and where he may have seen it rip through the looter’s body, he uses the metaphorical “life” instead. It’s not just a body to the soldier. You can’t see a bullet rip through an abstraction, like ‘life’ unless you are using it as a synonym for the body. The colloquial “broad daylight” is also part of this slow-motion scene – it’s clearly not possible to see broad daylight in the wake of a bullet, but the event has become hyper-real to the soldier and he is filling in the gaps.

The “sort of inside out” is again very spoken in style. Not poetic. Not imaginative. Not clever use of adjectives or metaphor, simile or alliteration. Just “sort of inside out”, an approximation. He lacks the words to describe how the looter looks after the bullets have torn through him. I’d say it’s a metaphor, but it’s not, is it? He probably had got more of him outside than in.

But then that struggle to voice what the dead looter looks like intensifies as we move on into the next verse. The line and verse break let us pause before moving on into the second attempt by the soldier to describe the body: “pain itself”. I’m struggling to pinpoint the exact language feature here, except to say that it is an almost reverse personification. One abstract idea becomes real in that dead – or dying – body. The same thing happens with the third detail, the “image of agony”. A tripartite image.

Now it becomes difficult to avoid talking about the threes in this poem. I still don’t know what it means though. I don’t in all sincerity think the three images here have much to do with the repeated three of the soldiers who opened fire. I think, in some ways, it has a lot to do with an avant-garde art movement of the early Twentieth Century: Cubism.

Cubism is an art movement that tried to capture the three dimensions of a thing. You find it in Literature too, in some of the works from this period. This is how Wikipedia defines Cubism: “In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form” – which is exactly what happens in this image. It is analysed, “sort of inside out”, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form: “pain itself, the image of agony”. The point of it is that it gives the object being described a more ‘real’ substance, allowing the writer (or painter) to present something in all of what it means to them at one captured moment of time. Writers would do this by using repetition and repeated phrases… kind of what Armitage is doing here. If you want to see this at work in a head-spinning kind of way, Gertrude Stein’s poem, “A Completed Portrait of Picasso” will show you. But other poets picked up on the repetition and the use of multiple perspectives.

Perhaps then, it’s one attempt to describe the body by each one of the soldiers who were involved in the shooting?

Who knows?

What we can definitely say is that the tripartite image allows the persona narrator to really try to fix on what the body looked like, to recreate the image in our mind. It also shows how he’s dwelling on that image, yet he can’t find a way to describe it in ways that please him, which is why he perhaps has three attempts at doing so. Or, it’s his attempt to make it clear to us: we often repeat ourselves when we worry that we will not be understood.

Then the poem slips out of that moment again, “One of my mates goes by”, and the scene comes to life again. There’s a carelessness to the way he “tosses” the “guts back into his body” and he’s “carted off in the back of a lorry”, which is evocative of other things by Wilfred Owen… the image in Dulce et Decorum Est where they “flung” the body of a soldier who had suffered a chemical gas attack into the back of a “wagon”. For me, it’s another of those “everyday” details that makes this seem like a run-of-the-mill event, as if it’s something that happened all the time. It’s not exactly disrespectful, just ‘hurried’, but in that the soldiers in both poems have no time to stop and reflect on the death they have just witnessed, it reminds us of the internal psychological conflict that many soldiers must go through in such circumstances. As Armitage says, “End of story. Except not really.”

For Armitage, the physical and the psychological, the past and the present all merge. It’s the “End of Story” physically… the body has been removed. But it hasn’t, “not really”, since the remains of the looter’s blood stay “on the street”, that “blood shadow”. Physically, it’s not exactly the end of the story for the body. Nor is the body leaving the end of the psychological effects for the soldier. That “blood shadow” is indelibly fixed in his psyche – it’s etched in his mind. He has no way to escape it. It’s not the end of the story psychologically. The past – the death, the killing – stick in the present with that “blood shadow” which reminds the man constantly of what happened, of “the image of agony”.

When the narrator says he has to “walk over it week after week”, we know that it isn’t just the shadow that he’s talking about, but the memory too. He is reliving that week after week. There’s a change of pace towards the end of this verse as the pace becomes more disjointed and choppy. “Then I’m home on leave” is entirely onomatopoeic, curt, brief. A change of scene. I’m imagining he thought that the blood shadow would disappear for good. That caesura followed by “But I blink”, which dangles at the end of the verse and the line, not unlike the technique Owen uses in Exposure. We don’t know what’s coming left. We’re left hanging, waiting for an answer. The connective, “but” sets up a change of direction. We’re guessing that home on leave is a good thing, but the change of direction in this word is as unexpected for us as it probably is for the narrator. Blinking seems such a natural, simple thing. In that blink, we are left, waiting. The enjambment runs us into the next verse hastily for an answer. When the narrator blinks, he sees the incident all over again. He doesn’t just see it. He relives it. It is present tense, at that moment, as real in his imagination as it was in real life. Look at all of those plosive B sounds as well. “But I blink… bursts… bank”

We’ve got other plosive sounds in there as well that makes this particularly abrupt, the K at the end of “blink” and the d in “door”. Those hard sounds add to the intensely monosyllabic line and bring that flashback to life for us just as it comes to life as the narrator blinks. It’s frightening because blinking is such a frequent and natural occurrence. You don’t even have to think about doing it. Also, you can’t stop yourself blinking. So we now that the writer cannot escape the flashbacks that can appear in the flash of an eye.

We have a second time that the flashbacks appear. He can’t even escape when he is asleep. “Sleep”, and we’ve got the repetition of “probably armed, possibly not” (ah, see…. it’s more like Gertrude Stein with her Picasso poem picking up on those repeated images… in fact, it’s at this point that I want to make a little aside to say that I found this poem quite simplistic to start, and seeing these avant-garde Cubist writerly techniques is giving me a new respect for something that felt a bit ‘churned out’, especially in recycling Owen’s body-flinging and tortured reliving of battle…) This repetition is powerful, looping back in. He can’t escape those memories and they haunt him in the exact same way, the exact same loop as happened at the time. He isn’t just remembering, he is reliving it in the present tense. Sleep too reminds me of Macbeth and his tortured “Macbeth shall sleep no more!” speech. “The balm of hurt minds,” Shakespeare called it. Certainly the narrator’s mind is in need of some balm or healing.

“Dream” follows the same pattern, and there’s that three again. “Blink. Sleep. Dream.” This time, it’s a loose rephrasing. “He’s torn apart by a dozen rounds.”

The final line of this verse really conveys that tortured mind so very well. “The drink and the drugs won’t flush him out”. We see what the narrator has been doing to escape this moment, to stop reliving it. It’s woefully inadequate, of course, self-medication. But it is a metaphor that is not a metaphor for the narrator. It feels like the memory is an enemy soldier inside his brain, sitting it out and attacking at random, or even when the narrator is most vulnerable. Of course, he is not physically inside the narrator’s head – it’s just a memory. But it feels real to the narrator, and that’s what’s important. Again, it’s monosyllabic which makes it more simple, more curt, more direct. It also relies on the rhythm of the repeated “dr” sound in “the DRINK and the DRUGS” as well as the stresses which fall on these words. It mixes in the loosely war-time/hunting metaphor about being “flushed out”. I imagine that war-time use of this word came from the hunting term, but it’s hard to know for sure. Simply put, if your enemy has “gone to ground”, is hidden or camouflaged, like a pheasant in the hedgerows, “flushing him out” is one way to get him to appear so that you can kill him.

But “flushing out” has another meaning as well, particularly one associated with liquids. We flush the toilet to “flush out” our waste. You can flush out your eyes if you get a foreign object in there. Detox people will tell you about flushing out your kidneys… it just means using water or liquid to clean something by flooding it and using water to dislodge it. You can see how this works on two levels with the alcohol. He’s using drink to try and dislodge the memory of the event, just as he is with the (non-liquid) drugs.

Particularly evocative word choices there.

As we move into the penultimate stanza, he carries on the image of the looter who has almost taken root in the soldier’s mind, “dug in behind enemy lines”. This works as a metaphor, the enemy lines being the soldier’s mind. A soldier who has “dug in” has dug a trench and is preparing to attack. It feels here as if the soldier is literally under siege from the enemy memory within his own head. It contrasts also with the ease of killing the escaping looter in the street, since this memory is proving much more difficult to eliminate than the looter was in real life.

We follow the same, terse, curt monosyllabic patterns following the enjambed dash between the two stanzas, “he’s here in my head”, where the “h” is a breathy alliteration that perhaps evokes (bear with me on this… It’s a bit of a stretch in terms of an effect, and it’s highly speculative! I wouldn’t want anyone taking it as read that these meanings are why Armitage is using the alliteration here!) the panicked breathing of the soldier (try three sharp “huh – huh – huh” breaths) or even the airy, intangible nature of the looter. I would very much doubt Armitage thought “I am deliberately going to stick in three ‘h’s in a row to make it sound like panicked breathing!” but I think it’s a nice effect nonetheless. It does sound to me like panicked breathing – a little. But the other sounds detract from that of course. You could almost say it sounds like a whisper. That works as well as an explanation of the effect of the alliteration there. Of course the soldier would be whispering if he didn’t want to alert the image in his mind. If that’s the effect you’re going for, there’s no reason at all why you couldn’t say that whispery sound evokes his paranoid state of mind. It certainly could. And there’s no reason at all why it can’t be doing both.

The stanza begins almost to rhyme as well, from “eyes” to “lines”, then a true rhyme in “land” and “sand” – then “hands” in the final couplet. I don’t know why it does that. Armitage does rhyme superbly – he uses it to eerie effect and to emphasise lines in many of his poems. I can’t say with any certainty what I think Armitage’s purpose is in doing so here. It feels to me like he’s using the rhyme to speed us to a final conclusion. It moves from colloquial to poetic, like he’s polished these words in his mind. Armitage likes patterns and plays around with them – it’s something I leave with you to consider, mainly because I don’t have any answers myself. For me, it certainly seems to drive on towards a desperate conclusion and that final line about how it is to take a life. I spent a lot of time on Google this morning looking at a variety of comments on Armitage’s rhyme across his poems (and even an article in The Guardian by Armitage where he seems to revel in the joys of the Arctic Monkeys’ internal rhyme) – there are lots of people, intelligent people, and guide books etc who point out that Armitage likes rhyme, perfect rhyme, internal rhyme and all other facets of rhyme, and not any of them talk about the effect. For me, it’s often pleasure or discomfort where Armitage uses rhyme. I think he uses it like a highlighter in his poetry to draw attention to emotion. But the jury is out and you are very welcome to give me your explanation of the effect of that building climactic perfect rhyme.

Another thing that seems to show a pondering of ideas, a climactic (cubist?!) build-up is the “distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land” where you can’t ignore the alliteration on the ‘s’ either…. the ending with its rhyme and alliteration is much more polished than the colloquial opening. The tone changes from the colloquial to the poetically rich. For me, it shows a polishing of those words, a deliberation on them.

We move in the final couplet to the alliterative “near to the knuckle”, which shows that neither time nor space can put distance between the narrator and the incident with the looter. It finishes with the very metaphoric “his bloody life in my bloody hands” which also plays on the rhythms there… “his BLOODy LIFE in my BLOODy HANDS”

We use this clichéd metaphor regularly… “my life is in your hands”. It usually means that we are responsible for whether someone lives or dies – or metaphorically – that we owe them a debt, we’re relying on them – not that our lives really depend on them. It’s a phrase that is at least a good couple of hundred years old, and Armitage uses it to show the narrator feels that he was (or is) responsible for the man’s life. But since we know that the looter died, we understand how profoundly guilty the soldier feels for having taken the life of the looter. It brings to mind the guilt of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, how she feels unable to wash away the spot of blood on her hands, how it tortures her, destroys her sleep and her peace of mind. It leaves us in no doubt that the narrator will forever be tortured by the death of the looter.

Next time, on through the anthology with Jane Weir’s Poppies

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

An Analysis of the context, form and structure of Remains by Simon Armitage

Okay lovelies, Simon Armitage is up next with his poem Remains, which appears in AQA’s GCSE English Literature anthology section Power and Conflict for exams from 2017 forward. English teachers love Simon Armitage and he’s become a real stalwart of GCSE courses.

That said, there’s not a lot of stuff out there on this poem, so I’m going to ignore a lot of the context stuff until it appears in the poem. Instead of starting globally as I am wont to do, and narrowing in, I’m going to start with the minutiae and work out. If I come across some stuff that I think you need to know the context of, why I shall go right ahead and tell you.

Just incidentally, when doing a search for the poem, I came across a website that has completely stolen my analysis of other poems. I was reading it and I thought “this sounds awfully like good sense, but they do love a semi-colon,” before I realised that those words were my words. It’s not the first time this has happened, but I do wish people would learn to quote their sources. Or write their own stuff. The latter, preferably. I’m quite proud that someone thinks I write enough sense to steal from.

Anyhow…

The form of the poem.

When I think about form, I think about this:

Form

How it’s set out on the page; line length, syllables, rhythm (metre) rhyme, what words are on what line, number of lines, sonnet, couplets, three lines, quatrains, regularity of the number of lines in a verse/stanza, capitals (or lack of) main punctuation at the end of lines or stanzas (, . , .  / , , , . / ; : ; . )  phrase splits and the way the words fall on each line, which ideas are linked within the line or stanza and which are separate, caesura, enjambment.

Form is what makes it a poem and not prose. Why does it look the way it does? What decisions has the poet made about what he has put on one line and what on another? Why this form?

These are the questions I ask myself. First bit of context: Armitage loves to play around with form. Many of his poems use form in interesting ways.

First, I’m asking myself what is usual and unusual about the poem? Four lines is about as regular a verse structure as you get. So we have regularity and normality. But then we don’t. Those last lines are a couplet, substantially different from the others. So we have to ask ourselves why is this? What is the significance of these things?

Of all the verse structures that Armitage could have picked, he went for four lines. So why this regularity? Is it suggesting a normality for the narrator? The way the poem starts suggests a kind of continuation from other stories – from the way the poem looks on the page, it wouldn’t seem that we were in for any surprises. For me, those four-line verses convey a regularity, a normality – given the colloquial tone, we wouldn’t think that this poem will lead to opening fire on a looter. The choice of form is mundane, hum-drum even. It has an added bonus of not detracting from the ideas and images in the poem either, which is good. For me, it’s a very ordinary form, the most ordinary of forms, so why would you pick such a normal form? I think it does a couple of things. The first is that it makes the event in itself seem mundane and humdrum, like it’s the kind of thing that happens every day. Take that with the opening of “on another occasion” and it sounds like it’s part a series of stories or everyday anecdotes. Having this most commonplace form supports the ‘commonplace’ – ironic, since this kind of event should not be commonplace in anybody’s life. I think in this way, the four-line verses emphasise the absurdity of the situation: it is nonsensical and illogical, unthinkable even, that this sort of event should be so commonplace that you’d a) not mention it first as the most pivotal of your military experiences and b) you’d attach no particularly special importance to it. Armitage is not the first to put ill-matching forms and content together to highlight the meaningless and irrational. Clown Punk is another poem where he does the same.

Another reason that he could have chosen this most commonplace form is that it is simply a vehicle for the content. When you strip the form of all its meaning, it’s kind of like presenting a fancy meal on a white plate or a piece of slate. No busy patterned china or fancy designs to detract from it. The white plate or slate is just a ‘clean’ way to present food in the same way as this commonplace form is a clean way to present the ideas. That way we don’t get bogged down in thinking about the line-breaks and the pace, the rhythm and way the words fall. Ironic that I just spent a good lengthy paragraph dissecting his choice of the four-line verse if that was Armitage’s purpose. In that case, I would be very sorry for pontificating over its significance when Armitage might have wanted to have zero significance at all were he prioritising the content.

There is absolutely no reason he can’t have done both things, by the way… chosen a commonplace form so that it doesn’t distract from the content, but at the same time using that to highlight the way that the narrator describes this event as something normal and ordinary, which highlights how irrational the event is.

And of course, it’s all normal and ordinary except for the finishing couplet which breaks with the rest of the poem.

So why the finishing couplet?

Shakespeare used couplets to finish off a story, to mark an ending, like the curtains drawing on a scene, or as a way to emphasise a character’s lines. It was as if to say “this will give you something to think about.” And the poem certainly does that. I think, perhaps a bit like Exposure, the verse is cut short, just as the man’s life was cut short. When Armitage says earlier “End of Story except not really”, this too feels like there is more that goes unsaid.

Although the first verse starts with neat end-stopped lines, the poem soon falls to enjambment and caesura, which fracture the rhythm just as it does in Bayonet Charge. I’ll explore more about the enjambment and caesura when I explore the language of the poem, because it makes more sense to think about which words he is emphasising and how. We’ll look in more detail at where the enjambment runs those ideas on, where we trip and fall over the rhythm.

Really, that’s as much as I want to say about the form in itself. There will be points when I’m discussing the language when I’ll want to show how he uses form to highlight or underscore a particular idea, but those would be better taken in context with the rest of the content.

So, when I’m thinking about structure, what does that entail exactly?

Structure refers to how the ideas are organised and sequenced, viewpoint/perspective (third person? First person?) TiP ToP – Time Place Topic Person – shifts? Shift in time? Place? Why are the ideas in this order? External actions (happenings) vs internal thoughts? Circular structure? Beginning, middle, end? How does the title weave through the poem? Does the ending link back or develop from the opening?

Structure is the arrangement and sequence of the ideas, as well as some other aspects. I ask myself why here and not there?

So how does this work when I look at Remains?

The first and most noticeable thing about the structure is the title itself. Remains. It’s a very open word. Whose remains? I’m pretty sure here that it is meant as a noun rather than a verb. Remains are the bits left of something. The pieces that are left over when the rest has been taken away. For me, it seems to suggest that what is left is something perhaps discarded. It is what is left when everything else has been removed. It can, of course, refer to a corpse, a dead body. A final sense of the word is the ‘remains’ of a writer: the fragments that are left after their death. All of those leave us with something to think about, to consider what the title means when we have considered the rest of the poem.

It asks more questions than it answers.

It could refer to the looter, of course. He is what is left when the others have escaped. It can be his body, his remains, what is left of him when the shooting has finished, the bit “carted off in the back of a lorry”, or the “blood shadow” on the street where it happened, the physical ‘ghost’ of him.

It could also refer to the idea that this event has had consequences for the narrator. It is about his own ‘remains’ and the bits left over in him following the shooting. I think it’s the “remains” of the man in Armitage’s memory, what is left of him, the fragments that appear when the narrator is “home on leave”. The “remains” of the man are what is left in the narrator’s head, “dug in behind enemy lines”, the memories of the event and of the man that torture the narrator. The title, then, is woven through the physical remains of the man, the physical “blood shadow”, the memories of the man in the narrator’s head.

In terms of structure, I can also think about the way the poem opens. That word “another” is an adjective at its most simple, describing “an occasion”, but it is also a discourse marker in that it’s used usually as a connective. We don’t start a conversation with “another”. It’s like starting it with “And” or “Additionally…”

Yet Armitage does this in other poems. To me, it implies a kind of sequence, that this is taken out of the middle of something. It’s not something we use entirely in speech for fluency, but there is something in this poem that suggests to me that it is the spoken word. It feels to me almost like those wartime oral histories the BBC is a fan of collecting for posterity. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly, but I think it’s a lot to do with the colloquial tone, “one of them legs it up the road,” and the slips of tense, “we get sent out”, as well as the word “Well”, which is a kind of filler here, softening it and making it sound more like a spoken monologue. We also have lots of simple coordinating conjunctions like “and” and “so” as well as the run-on lines and the word “then” which acts as a kind of simple temporal connective. I once listened to a friend’s son telling a story. He started telling it in Paris. Three hours later, he was still telling it. It didn’t have any stopping points at all as every single sentence was spliced together with an “and then”. People use these a lot in speech to help with fluidity. I think that these are some of the ways that Armitage makes it sound more like spontaneous spoken English than a poem as such. The word “another” in that opening acts almost as an exophoric reference, referring to events outside the text that we have no knowledge of as a reader or listener, but we would if we were the “real” audience to whom Armitage’s character narrator seems to be talking to. I think we are asked to be a kind of interviewer, or psychotherapist maybe, psychiatrist or priest. It leaves us with an interesting question… who does Armitage’s character narrator think the reader is? We’re definitely a confidante of some kind. It reminds me in this way of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Stealing a former AQA Anthology stalwart, except that it is less interactive. It’s clear Armitage’s persona is talking, but there is no sense of to whom or even that he is aware anyone is listening. The persona seems isolated and cut off.

Other things I can talk about include the voice and viewpoint: we have a character narrator, a construct Armitage is using to voice the situation. We need to think about the effect of his first-person choice rather than if he had told it as a third person choice. So what’s the effect of that? You can think about how he uses it to give us an insider point of view, how he uses it to make it more personal. Yet, like many poems about conflict, it is an ‘unnamed voice’ that could represent the experiences of a good number of soldiers. GCSE answers could get a lot of mileage out of explaining the effect of that first-person unnamed voice on the reader.

What else is interesting is the tense of the poem. The character narrates it entirely in present tense, even though it is clear it happened in the past. What I think this does is create the notion that the poet is still living this moment, that this event is still ‘now’ for him. It really helps with the “here and now” feeling of the poem.

Other things I might want to comment on in terms of the structure are the way it moves from the past to the present, from an external event to internal feelings. It has a narrative chronological structure, following time order from the past to the present. From this we could assume that it has implications for the soldier’s future too, if we can work off that progression. That present tense helps make it not only “here and now” but ‘always’. It will always be with him. The man will always be “dug in” his memory.

From the innocuous starting tone, a soldier recounting events, it becomes clear that this is no wartime voice, no objective reflection on things that have gone. By the end, we realise that the character narrator will be haunted by what he has done for the rest of his life. There is no escaping that image, even in sleep. It reminds me very much in this way of Mental Cases by Wilfred Owen and Survivors by Siegfried Sassoon, some of the earliest poems about shell-shock (which would go on to be named Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or an Acute Stress Response) Although one thing is different: this not a man who seems on the surface to have had his mind destroyed by what he has done. He is not a skeletal zombie who is haunted to such an extreme that they slobber and drool. He is coherent. He is fluent. Yet he is haunted. I don’t think it loses anything by being less shocking than Mental Cases or Survivors in its imagery. If anything, this man’s haunting, personal hell is all the more unsettling because he seems so coherent. Here, you can’t see what lies beneath, even in the opening lines of the poem, we have no idea.

In the next post, I’ll look at the language and imagery used by Armitage in the poem, exploring how he recreates the event for us.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

An analysis of the language and imagery in Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes

In the last post, I explored the use of form and structure in Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes, which is in this year’s AQA GCSE English Literature anthology for exams from 2017.  Today, I’ll be exploring how language works with the form and structure to convey Hughes’ viewpoint about the themes of conflict explored in the poem.

Bayonet Charge starts in the middle of the action, unlike some other poems in the anthology, which give you the necessary back story you need to make sense of it. Here, all we get is the title, an unknown war, an unknown time. It isn’t an entire story like The Charge of the Light Brigade.

So, what’s the effect of starting in the middle of something?

It’s immediately more dramatic. We’re dropped into the action, unprepared, perhaps like the soldier himself. The opening word ‘Suddenly’ emphasises this. It’s as much a shock for us as it is for the soldier. We also see that it’s past tense. This is another point of comparison with The Charge of the Light Brigade which is also past tense.

Here, you’ve got to think about the effect of tense. Present tense makes something more real, more ‘now’ – it’s as if it is happening now in front of our very eyes. We don’t know, just as the characters don’t, what will happen. Past tense is reflection. It gives us time to think, to consider our angle. I suppose, in a way, present tense is a little less biased – it’s presenting what happens, as it happens. Of course, this is only an illusion. All poems are written after the event, rather than during it. It’s not as if they unravel as time does. Past tense means that you’re reflecting on a completed action. There isn’t much, however, that is reflective about this poem. However, writing after the fact means that Ted Hughes, just like Tennyson, is allowed to consider his ‘spin’, his angle on things, to add his views and to polish the writing. Past tense is more commonly used with narrative and reflective writing. Present tense is more vivid in some ways, because it’s like watching something as it happens.

There’s something peculiar about what’s happening. The soldier, who is as yet un-named, and his role unidentified (we don’t know that he’s a soldier – it just says ‘he’ – and we can only guess from the title) is awake and immediately running. It’s odd. We don’t normally wake up and then start running. Why would we do this? Because we’re under threat? Are we running to something, or away from something?

The word ‘raw’ is separated by a dash from the line. The poet makes us stop and think about this word. It stands alone, brief and ‘raw’. And then he repeats it in the next line, so if we were in any doubt about the importance of this word, we aren’t now. So what does raw tell us? It tells us that something is unfinished or unprocessed (like ‘raw’ crude, which is petrol as it comes out of the ground, unrefined) and like his seams, which aren’t sewn over, aren’t made for comfort. They’re rubbing against him, making his skin ‘raw’. When our skin is ‘raw’, we’re often describing a wound. His skin has been chaffed until it is red. It’s painful. It’s a word that evokes pain. It’s what happens when something abrasive has rubbed on your skin. It’s also a word that when we use about emotions means emotions that are really clear, really on the surface, “strong and undisguised” (Oxford Dictionary) which could mean that all his emotions are on show, for everyone to see.

There are other things we could say about this word ‘raw’

• Is he like a ‘raw’ recruit, unpolished, unrefined, inexperienced?
• Is it that his skin is raw on a literal level?
• Is he emotionally raw, on a metaphorical level?
• Are his emotions strong and undisguised, like ‘raw anger’?

This little fragmented, repeated word gives us a lot to think about and it works on lots of levels.

The word ‘khaki’ is our first sign that this is an army situation. Khaki is the colour of army uniforms, and it’s often used in a military sense. It’s little clues like this that make it overtly about the war, in ways that we have only seen so far in Charge of the Light Brigade. 

The third line starts with ‘stumbling’. Like all the great verbs in The Charge of the Light Brigade, this is a very evocative word. If you stumble, it’s like you’re out of control. Wilfred Owen says a man caught in a mustard gas attack was ‘stumbling’ in his poem Dulce et Decorum Est – it doesn’t sound like the noble, brave or glorious soldiers in The Charge of the Light Brigade with all their sabres flashing, racing on proud horses into battle. This sounds like a man running to escape, desperate. If we stumble, we are hesitant. We stumble when we are unsure, when we have made a mistake. It sounds as if this man is at great risk. Yet we are three lines into the poem, and other than the title, we have no concept of why he is running. 

Like other poems in the selection, Bayonet Charge also uses the natural as a contrast. He races towards a ‘green hedge’ – it seems strangely out of place on this battlefield. We’re reminded that often, battlefields are exactly that: fields. And yet, other than his khaki clothing and the title, we’ve had little other clue that this man is a soldier or is involved in a battle. We see here how incongruous a war would be, out in the countryside. It doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t seem natural. 

The first five lines use enjambment to run the lines into each other, so you end up saying them like this:

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw In raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy, Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing Bullets smacking the belly out of the air –

It’s all one long breathless sentence – and it still doesn’t have a full stop when we get to line 5. So why would Ted Hughes want us to be breathless? Does it evoke and recreate the soldier’s own breathlessness, unable to take a pause?

Not only that, but we stumble over our words too, when reading it aloud. It makes us read the words in a halting, hesitant manner, although speeding through it. The line breaks don’t fall where maybe they might, similar in ways to Heaney in Storm on the Island. In contrast to that poem, though, where the secterian violence is an unmentioned backdrop to the poem, where the lexical field of war is used to paint a picture of how nature attacks the island, here it is the war which seems out of place. 

The fourth line is where we begin to see the images of war: the hedge is dazzling with ‘rifle fire’ – which makes us wonder why he’s running to the hedge – surely, if that’s where all the bullets are going, he’s better behind the bullet line? Is he just running into danger? The verb ‘dazzled’ is very reminiscent of words in The Charge of the Light Brigade, which also uses words like ‘flashed’ to describe the weaponry. It’s these verbs that make the poem so vivid and recreate the sights of conflict. ‘Dazzled’, to me, doesn’t have the same visceral brutality as ‘smacked’ in the next line. Dazzled, if anything, is quite pretty. Smacked is not.

Ted Hughes personifies nature here, the air, saying the bullets ‘smacked’ the belly out of the air. It’s as if nature itself is the target: it’s the hedge being shot up, it’s the air that is being shot in the belly. Belly is also a fairly basic, evocative word. In fact, the word belly was banned from the Bible for a couple of centuries! Still, children often say ‘tummy’ rather than ‘belly’ and if you ask a grown-up they might say stomach, or a doctor might say ‘abdomen’ – belly is still a word that has got a fairly crude whiff about it. It’s a brutal, basic word. The Bible sees the belly as the seat of all our more primitive emotions, lust, greed and so on. Put it with ‘smacking’ and you’ve got some fairly brutal, harsh language. Couple that with the image of the air being shot at, and you’ve got a really powerful image. The ‘b’s in this line are also fairly plosive. Your mouth closes to say the ‘b’ (like other plosive sounds) and then pushes it from your mouth. Plosive sounds are often used by Hughes and his contemporary, Heaney, to have an oral effect. And the effect of a plosive explosion of ‘b’s? It’s harsh, basic and violent. Those plosive words ‘belly’ and ‘bullets’ really add to the effect of the poem, how violent it sounds. You might think I’m labouring the point but there are only four ‘b’ plosive sounds in the first verse, and two of them are on this line. This image of nature being attacked by war is the reverse of the images that we see in Exposure where it is nature that is the enemy.

Following these harsh plosives and the personification of the air, we have a simile: ‘he lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm’. This image shows how the rifle has become almost like an extra limb – albeit a useless one. It’s dead weight. It’s also a very violent image – a ‘smashed’ arm – not just broken, but ‘smashed’. It couldn’t be much more brutal. It reminds us that the machinery and weaponry of war is senseless, literally, unfeeling. It’s a part of him, like an arm, but also it’s not a part of him – it’s useless, a hindrance.

Hughes moves to the pluperfect tense when he describes the patriotism that ‘had’ driven this man, suggesting that it is not there now. Now it is ‘sweating like molten iron’ from him – iron being heavy, weighing him down, but also metal – an inanimate object as unfeeling as the rifle. All of these metallic images seem to make him sound ‘robotic’ – like he is being replaced by metal and weaponry, like Robocop.

At that moment, he is ‘bewildered’, confused. And what confuses him? That confusion also echoes the confusion of Owen in Exposure. It reminds me here of another Owen poem too, Futility, where Owen reflects on God and life, how pointless the miracle of the universe seems when lives are snuffed out so easily and without consequence or even recognition. 

Where Owen refers to the ‘cold’ emotionless clay that formed the world in Futility, Hughes calls it a ‘cold clockwork’ suggesting something emotionless and mechanical, inhuman. The alliteration of ‘c’ – cuh – is cutting. It’s another plosive sound – kuh – and it’s cacophonous – dischordant. It stands out. It emphasises the ‘cold clockwork’ – making us think about it. The alliteration draws attention to it. Again, like many of the other poems in the selection, God is not present in this war. It continues the theme of this literally ‘god-forsaken’ war – a war that God can have no part in. All we are is ‘cold clockwork’ – the universe is something mechanised, something emotionless. The soldier ponders his place in time, where all this conflict fits in the grand scheme of things. In the billions of years that have passed and may pass, what is the significance of this war? Like Owen, even like Tennyson, he raises questions that almost cannot be answered, because the answer is that life, death and conflict are meaningless, pointless. And that very nihilistic thought is almost too depressing to live with. No wonder the soldier almost stops.

He ‘listens’ for the reason for things, and finds no reason at all.

Out in the middle of this chaos, where the soldier is frozen like a statue, a ‘yellow hare’ appears. The land here is ‘shot slashed’ and it reminds me that no matter where you go in a war-ravaged area, you cannot but think of the tragedy and the blood spilt, that the rain and seasons have now washed away. We don’t know if the hare has been shot, but it seems injured. It is ‘threshing’, in a circle, like an animal might do with a broken leg, unable to go in a straight line. It comes from the word ‘thrashing’, as in ‘thrashing about’ – moving ‘in a violent and convulsive way’ – it doesn’t head for freedom. Its mouth is ‘wide/Open silent,’ and here, Hughes uses the enjambment and the semi-caesura of the comma to make this bit fractured and fragmented, disjointed. It’s a terrible image, this hare in pain on the battlefield, reminding us that war is totally opposite to what is natural and good. It destroys the natural order of things. It gets worse. The hare isn’t just thrashing about violently in a circle, with its mouth open, as if screaming silently, but its eyes are ‘standing out’ – it’s terrified. Its last moments are in pain, terror and fear. It’s a hideous image. But then, is it any different for any of the soldiers who die? The hare seems almost a euphemistic, softer way of making us think about the soldiers who died in similar ways. It’s almost too painful to imagine.

Still, this spurs the soldier on, to make it to the safety of the green hedge, if safety is what he’ll find there. Hedges are often homes and protection for small birds, small countryside animals like voles and mice, protecting them from predators, and here, I’m reminded of the sanctuary a hedge provides for smaller creatures from things like hawks. A hedge is their fortress. Yet we know a hedge isn’t going to protect this soldier from bullets or bayonets.

What spurs him on? Patriotism. ‘King, honour, human dignity’ – like Henry V spurring on his men in Shakespeare’s play, who rallies his men with ‘cry ‘God for Harry, England and St George!’ (and if you want a great rallying call that picks up on patriotism and loyalty, Henry V’s speech is a great place to start, since it picks up on loads of great images that are used to spur men on to be victorious in battle, like Henry V was at Agincourt) – but Hughes undermines the effect of this little tripartite rally (there’s your little persuasive list of three, like ‘Harry, England and St George!’) with ‘etcetera’ as if he can’t be bothered to name all the other trite and meaningless words that fill his spirit. It’s a real anticlimax. Shakespeare finishes on ‘St George’ – a real build-up – and yet  Hughes undermines his with this little ‘etcetera’ – as if you already know how it goes. It really shows how hollow and pointless this is, this use of anticlimax at the end. If those words did make you feel patriotic, then ‘etcetera’ bursts that patriotic bubble.

Hughes calls these thoughts ‘luxuries’ – as if in war, he can’t afford to be driven by these thoughts. A luxury is something we can do without, something non-essential, something additional or extra to what we need. Still, it is these thoughts that spur him on to finally make his way to safety. If, again, that’s what the hedge is. I can’t help but think if the hedge is ‘dazzling’ with gun shot, he’s actually going to find this isn’t a safe haven at all. A luxury can be a comfort, though, and we get the feeling that although these feelings of patriotism aren’t essential to battle, it’s what keeps him going. When he stops to question what it is all about, Hughes tells us: country, honour, dignity. It’s a battle for something more than land. You are doing it for something bigger than you will ever be. And it’s enough to light this man’s fuse.

We then get a sense that the hedge is hiding the enemy – he gets his bayonet out and runs at the hedge. It’s as if he’s attacking nature. Of course, Hughes doesn’t say that he’s running into the enemy. This soldier has gone ‘over the top’ and is running at the enemy. The hedge is marking the enemy. The dazzling is rifle fire. The hedge is not protection, but the enemy. He is running to certain death. A bayonet is a knife that you fit to the end of your rifle in order to charge at the enemy – designed for close-quarter combat, man on man. It’s a last-resort weapon – it’s not ‘clean’ like rifle fire, because you’re up close and personal with the men you have to kill, and if you are in a situation where you have to use a bayonet, your chance of survival is pretty limited. This soldier is nothing but ‘cannon fodder’ – food for the enemy, served up on a plate. They have nothing to do but run at the enemy and hope to overwhelm them. It’s an utterly pointless and useless method of combat reserved only for speeding up death when picking off people by rifle fire is taking too long, and you are cornered without ammunition or supplies.

It worked in earlier wars, where a platoon could run across a battlefield or no-man’s-land knowing that the enemy might only get off a couple of rounds, because muskets took such a long time to load. But it didn’t work by the time of World War One, because rifles were so much more accurate and so much more quick to load. A bayonet charge was a battle tactic that was outdated and cost many, many lives. So we get a sense of how ridiculous it is for this man to run with his bayonet at a hedge-full of whatever enemy it is that he’s facing. We also get no sense that he is in company. There’s a real feeling that he’s alone and that he’s facing a larger number of this nameless enemy – his prospects of living are very slim.

What it is finally that sets fire to the ‘dynamite’ of his terror is a little thought of patriotism. It is his ‘dynamite’ terror if anything that is forcing him to run, to fight, not honour or duty or loyalty or patriotism.

Next week, an exploration of Remains by Simon Armitage

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

An analysis of the context, form and structure of Bayonet Charge

Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes gets its second outing as a GCSE English Literature anthology poem for AQA, having previously been included in the last. Whilst it may not be his best poetic offering, it fits well within the Power and Conflict section and compares easily with other war poems such as The Charge of the Light Brigade as well as those that explore the battle with nature such as Exposure or even Storm on the Island.

Context… Ted Hughes, like Heaney, is a poet who often explores nature in his poems. I don’t think he’s as accessible as Heaney, which is why you find fewer of his poems littering anthologies, although some of his poems are popular in collections. Like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he was also Poet Laureate, which shows in some measure his popularity. Hughes’ father served during World War One and fought at Ypres. This poem is from his first collection, published in 1957, The Hawk in the Rain, which contains a number of poems about the war. The most interesting images in this collection as you might be able to work out from the title are the way he uses animals to explore a number of themes. The Thought Fox, View of a Pig and Pike are three of his poems that focus on animals and use them to explore other themes. The collection itself is noted for its use of rhythm and the way Ted Hughes, not unlike Heaney, also uses the sounds of words for specific effect and to complement the ideas in his poems.

In terms of ideas in the poem, it compares well with Charge of the Light Brigade simply because of those graphic, violent images.

When we start looking at the form of the poem, we see that it’s written in free verse. We see those three stanzas of seven or eight lines – there’s a loose regularity, but nothing you would feel compelled to comment on. The stanzas are as long as they need to be and do not force the poem or box it into corners by requiring it to be more ‘neat’. You’ll notice the stanzas blend into one another, as we consider how the ideas are structured and we see that the first stanza runs into the second, and the second runs into the third. I think that it is more than appropriate to convey the sense of motion in the poem, to echo the way the soldier moves through the poem. The first line of stanza two seems to be very much a part of the first stanza, and then the second line changes subject, as he stops and reflects on the “cold clockwork” – almost like the soldier is frozen in motion as his mind reflects on the events, or like the poet deliberately (almost) stops him in mid-charge to interject this reflection on what it is the soldier is doing here.

Similarly as we move into stanza three, the last line of stanza two seems like it would be better placed in stanza three, but the gap between the stanzas very much emphasises the shot-slashed furrows. I’ll talk more about why he runs an idea into stanza two from stanza one, and why he leaves that little fragment of stanza three hanging back there in stanza two, but the overall effect is one of a disjointed, fragmented and fractured moment.

The poem is not driven or constrained by rhythm and rhyme in the same way that other poems are. One of the focal points we might notice about the form of the poem is that it makes a lot of use of enjambment, with two noticeably enjambed lines in stanza one, the “raw/in raw-seamed hot khaki,” and “hearing/bullets smacking the belly out of the air” where the rest of the line breaks kind of fall where you would expect them to. That begs us to consider why he runs these lines into the next, why he wants to break up these phrases. For me, he leaves that word “raw” hanging at the end of the line, making it more important somehow, especially given the repetition of the word. It really makes us reflect on that rawness. And in the second, there is a gap between “hearing” and what he hears, the “bullets”, which seems to slow them down – a tiny, mini pause on paper that we don’t hear in the reading. That word “hearing” dangles… We’d read it and wonder what it is he hears, it’s like the word “bullets” catches up a microsecond later.

In stanza two, we also have some interesting use of enjambment, focusing us on the words “running” and “runs”. The lines literally run into the next line. When you take that huge sentence, split over four lines, you are obliged to think about why Hughes has written it this way:

                                                                                     He was running
Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs
Listening between his footfalls for the reason
Of his still running, and his foot hung like
Statuary in mid-stride.

That 35-word sentence is long. It leaves us breathless to read. That’s its first effect… we are as breathless as he is. I’m reading, desperate for the comma after “still running”, and by the time I get there, I’m breathless. It makes that breath-pause comma-stop even more necessary and when I read it aloud, I find myself stopping there for longer than I would to catch my breath. For me, it emphasises the need to get to the target (the comma) in order to breathe again… I’m conscious of needing to get there, just as the soldier must be to get to the safety of his target – “the green hedge”. I’ll talk more about how he uses enjambment to add meaning to those active verbs in the next post exploring the language and imagery in the poem.

In the third stanza, we also have some noticeable enjambment between “wide/open silent”, splitting the idea over two lines. I think this does a similar thing as it has done in other parts of the poem. The line breaks stop us in mid-phrase, leaving us hanging for a microsecond, as if time has just stopped still at that moment. I don’t know why but it reminds me of when they slow film down and you can see the individual frozen moments that make up a movie. It seems to capture that moment like a photograph and freeze it, like they’re in suspended animation. At the very least, it allows us to process the image, to take it in. But where he splits phrases across lines, those line breaks seem to me to be a chasm of a pause rather than just a line break. The effect for me is that it seems to put the soldier – or the hare – into suspension, stopping them for a brief moment before continuing.

When we consider structure, the poem starts as if the man has awoken from sleep. It drops us right into the action alongside the soldier when it starts with “Suddenly he awoke”. It’s disorienting and confusing. We have no idea what woke him or why he is running, or indeed who “he” is. Like Heaney’s and Owen’s ambiguous “we”, this “he” gives us no idea who “he” is, although the title will, of course, have filled us in on what is happening here. The title gives us a sense of what is going on and why he is running – it’s essential in order to make meaning from the first line that we understand the title. But it gives us a little of the soldier’s confusion and disorientation.

The poem narrates two moments: the soldier running, and then the appearance of the hare. We notice the word “then” at the end of the second stanza which shifts us on to the next moment. It’s a brief incident, but it is described in such detail that it becomes almost slow motion, with each action distinct. The introduction of the hare seems almost surreal, and we’re reminded that in order for the man to pass the hare, the hare’s “threshing circle” must be its death throes. It wouldn’t make sense any other way.

I find the ending the most interesting aspect of the structure: does the soldier get to the hedge or not? We don’t know. It is left unfinished. The fact that the poem is also past tense means that Hughes could have made that clear, had he wanted to, but it finishes with the final moment being the soldier’s wish to get to the hedge, “to get out of that blue crackling air” – and that’s where it finishes. We never know if he survives or if he dies. It’s a bit of a philosophical dilemma – like Schrodinger’s cat. You’ll need to get someone better at explaining complex quantum physics to tell you about Schrodinger’s cat, but essentially the dilemma is this: there is a cat in a box. It’s either alive or dead. Until you open the box, it is BOTH alive AND dead. I have no idea what the comparison is supposed to explore, but the soldier is in that same state. It’s possible he lived, it’s possible he died. Both things are true and not true. The poem finishes with the uncertainty over the man’s life. We don’t know who he is, which war this is, when this is, where this is, and we finish the poem not even knowing if he is alive or dead. In this way, Hughes leaves us with an enormous mystery which leaves us feeling unsettled.

The poem is not just observational – there are moments where we go into the mind of the soldier. By the last four lines of the poem, it has become much more subjective as Hughes takes us into the inner thoughts of the soldier. What had been largely observational and focused on external actions is now focused on telling us that the soldier has forgotten all the nobility, the glory of war and is only now fixed on saving himself. We have a structural shift then from external actions to internal thoughts as we arrive at the final lines. That subjectivity touches us too as a reader: we cannot help but feel like we want him to get to safety, but we are cheated of that knowledge.

In the next post, I’ll look at how Hughes uses language and imagery in Bayonet Charge, exploring the words he chooses and how he uses the sound of language for effect as well as some of the ideas within the poem.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

An analysis of the context, form and structure of Seamus Heaney’s Storm on the Island

The second of the 20th Century poems in the Power and Conflict section of the AQA GCSE English Literature anthology, this poem is by one of my favourite modern poets, Seamus Heaney.

Yesterday, I read an article in the Washington Post documenting terrorism in Europe since 1970. I imagine most GCSE students will be surprised to see that very heavy cluster of red over Northern Ireland. Somehow, ‘The Troubles’ as they came to be known, seem to have faded in significance compared to other threats, and there will be many sixteen-year-olds who will have no idea who Tim Parry or Johnathon Ball were, or why a post box in Manchester is a permanent reminder of the conflict over Northern Ireland. If you ask most of today’s students who was responsible for the biggest bomb on mainland Great Britain since the second world war, I’m pretty sure the image of the IRA has all but faded.

Seamus Heaney’s life saw both the escalation of conflict over Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s and a tentative peace in 1998. In Northern Ireland at this time, politics mattered. Politics and religion. Heaney manages to by-pass most of that in his poetry, yet it’s a theme that very much touches his work. There are poems that tackle issues around the conflict, and in many I find a sense of conflict, an uneasy tension, even if they are not about the Troubles themselves. Storm on the Island very much fits into that tradition. To me, Heaney manages to avoid the conflict, and not avoid it, if you like. It seems to hover over a lot of his poems like a shadow. Some are more overtly about politics, like Requiem for the Croppies and the collection, North, This collection was Heaney’s most controversial: people wanted him to be more political. Some people wanted him to use less violent images. Some people wanted him to write about the present, not the past, or not blend the two. For me, I think the past was very much tied up with the present for Heaney, and with his mixed heritage (he was both Catholic and and an Ulster-man, who then moved into the Republic of Ireland proper) and I think he must have felt profoundly uncomfortable to be expected to be political. What mattered to him was Ireland itself, a place with no boundaries, a place as old as the earth, the landscape of the place, its eternal qualities. But that’s just one English Teacher’s opinion.

Incidentally, I met Seamus Heaney once in the bar in Stratford, during the intermission of Julius Caesar. I told him I was his groupie, which made him laugh. When you have studied Heaney at GCSE, A level and degree, and then spent 20 years teaching it in successive GCSE specifications, those lines stick in your head. He asked me what my favourite poem of his was. It’s Personal Helicon, by the way, but I think he found it funny that I knew it by heart. For me, those final lines, “I rhyme/ to see myself, to set the darkness echoing” sum up much of his own poetry. It’s intensely personal. It’s a story of himself. But it’s also a story of how he looks into the land to find himself, how he looks to the past as a source of inspiration. A poet, for me, who writes to see himself, to reflect upon himself and see the ripples.

You may be right to ask, then, if the Troubles in Northern Ireland had anything to do with Storm on the Island. Isn’t it just a “conflict of man and nature” poem like Exposure or Stealing the Boat? Isn’t it just a reflection on how pointless our best-laid plans are, the way nature and the landscape will always triumph? Of course it is. But I’d be interested to read any interpretation of how it comes to have this dark shadow of Ireland’s Troubles. Ironic, indeed, that the Troubles themselves were a metaphorical ‘storm’ on the Ireland. When he published North in 1975, some critics thought he should have steered clear of politics altogether. I find that there’s a deep sense of discomfort in Heaney’s work. The land of Ireland seems to give him roots, make him strong, remind him of who he is, like the house itself in the poem, but at the same time, how can you be a poet of the time and NOT be influenced by all those red dots on the Washington Post article? It feels sometimes that Heaney is avoiding the huge, great elephant in the room which in itself has a lot to do with who he is.

Heaney, by the way, did an in-depth interview with another Seamus, Seamus Deane, which you can read here if you are very, very interested in what Heaney thought about poetry and politics, or you’re a world-class geeky curious-mind like me. What I particularly like about what he said is this: “Poetry is born out of the watermarks and colourings of the self.” – it’s like a way of seeing yourself. I like to think of Storm on the Island as part of that tradition, that he reveals a lot about himself in the poem. I also think that ‘home’ for Heaney is always tied-up with a sense of conflict. In another poem, Tollund Man, he finishes by saying how much the Iron Age Scandinavian human sacrifices feel familiar to him: “I will feel lost, unhappy and at home” – that internal conflict about home life is something that we see often in Heaney. You know, the kind of conflict you feel about your home town, your family… how you love it because it’s who you are, but at the same time, it often makes you unhappy.

I think it’s important to understand the role of all this internal conflict for Heaney before you start reading Storm on the Island.

Storm on the Island comes from Heaney’s earliest published collection, Death of a Naturalist. This collection seems very much about how he realises that nature is not some gentle, lovely thing, but it has its moments when you realise that we put a real gloss on it. The title poem tells about him being told in school about the “Mammy Frog” and the “Daddy Frog”, which is all very lovely and sanitised, only for the young Heaney to end by feeling that “the great slime kings” were an “obscene threat” and he feels like the frogspawn would grab his hand and pull him into the water if he tried to steal any of it, as if it was some scary B-movie monster. I think that sums up Heaney’s ambivalence about nature. It’s not this lovely, pretty thing. Do a Google Image search for ‘Nature’ and you’ll see how people view it… waterfalls and lovely forests, sunshine and trails. And then do a Google Image search for ‘Scary nature’ and you’ll see what Heaney’s suggesting Nature can be. For him, it’s not one or the other. It’s both. As a whole, this collection is very much about the issues that Nature brings for Heaney, how blackberries ‘rot’, how farmhands drown kittens. The world in itself is a place that gives Heaney not only a sense of wonder and joy, but also a sense of terror and fear, just like the young Wordsworth.

The poem itself makes an easy comparison with Stealing the Boat, especially when you look at the form of the poems.

The poem in itself is one single, solid block. 19 unrhymed lines of 10 or 11-syllables ended by a half-rhyme couplet. The form in itself echoes the “squat” houses, the solidity in the way that they are built to bear the brunt of the Atlantic weather fronts. It also does something else, capturing the storm as one single event, the lines themselves reflecting the unrelenting storm. Like Stealing the Boat, this too is free verse, apart from that final half-rhymed couplet. It seems to bring the poem to an end. Shakespeare often used the rhyming couplet to draw an end to a scene, but also to encapsulate an idea. Those words, “air” and “fear” echo each other, but not quite. It is not harmonious, but not completely dischordant. It serves to bring attention to those lines, but also to give a kind of finality to the lines. They are set apart from the blank verse of the rest of the lines. It heightens the build-up to the content of these lines. Like Wordsworth, Heaney is not bound or restricted by the syllabic length of the lines, and his words do not adhere to the ‘one-TWO’ stress of iambic pentameter. They’re pretty free-ranging.

He also uses the enjambed lines and the caesura to break up and fragment the poem in parts, and to build to a crescendo in others. Like the Duke in My Last Duchess who loses control of his emotions which spill out over several lines and then are broken up by caesura, Heaney is also using enjambment in places where there is a crescendo of emotion, but what marks this poem for me is the use of caesura, not enjambment. Look at the way he takes all those words and dumps them at the beginning of a line before stopping, disrupting the rhythm…

We are prepared:
or stooks that can be lost.
Blast.
But no:
Turned savage.
And strafes invisibly.

19 lines, and 6 of them include a caesura that picks up some ideas from a previous line and dumps them on the next.

We should, of course, be asking Heaney’s purpose in doing this. What is the reason for all this caesura? That abrupt stop, particularly on those hard, stressed monosyllabic words ‘blast’ and ‘lost’, really gives the poem some force. Or, rather, it gives the storm itself some force. It’s an uneven rhythm, like the storm itself, picking up ideas in one place and dropping them in another, like a storm picking up trampolines and dumping them in a garden down the road. That pause also makes us stop a moment and adds emphasis and importance to those words. Why does Heaney want us to think so much about that word, “blast” or the word “savage”? Remember that in poetry in particular, the punctuation and line breaks are about where you breathe, and it’s interesting to me how Heaney is playing with the way we breathe here. It’s not a coincidence to me that he’s using these caesuras to drop words onto the next line so frequently.

One of the places in the poem where Heaney uses enjambment very effectively is in the ‘growing’ idea of:

You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage.

What you get here is a sentence that runs over five lines of the poem, spilling out over those lines, a crescendo in itself, just like the sea. You’ve got some very interesting monosyllables there too, with the “the flung spray hits” and “down on the cliffs”. In fact, with “like a tame cat”, you’ve got three lines there that finish with a very staccato four-word group, and the assonance of the “i” in “cliffs” and “hits” which also adds to that staccato effect. Lots of short vowel sounds, the “uh” of “the” and “flung”, the “i” of “cliffs” and “hits”, the internal rhyme of “spits” and “hits”… lots of things going on here with the words, with the sounds. Short sounds are hard, mitigated by the occasional “ay” or “oh” in “down”, “spray” and “tame”. Couple that with the monosyllables and what you’ve got is words with a very staccato effect. They’re brief, strong and articulated clearly, the words detached from one another in “FLung SPRay HIts”… I’ll write more about this in the next post, looking in more depth at those words, at the way Heaney describes the house, the storm, the wind, the sea. But what the form gives us is this unrelenting, unstopping sentence that keeps coming at you with a wordy assault. P.S. if you know someone who enunciates like Gary Oldman in Friends, stand a good few feet back when they read these lines.

Those plosives and sibilants do have a remarkable spitty effect if you know someone who enunciates like that!

Now why might Heaney want all of those sounds in there?

In terms of the structure, we start with the poet and his use of “we”, which compares well with Exposure, suggesting a sense of community maybe. We notice another thing, too, about the structure, as to why there are no stanzas or verses. Not only does it help create that ‘squat’ effect on the page as I mentioned before, but we realise this is one single moment: there is no structural need for breaks. It helps emphasise once again that sense of relentlessness. Still, as it goes, it provides an internal commentary at first, that they are prepared, a justification for the way they build the houses, a commentary on the landscape and its barren tree-less, feature-less appearance, It moves on with the thoughts, in “you might think”, where I get the impression almost that this is a conversation between poet and reader, that he places us inside the cottage on the island alongside him almost. It takes on properties not unlike My Last Duchess, where we are given a role to play as reader. We’re very much ‘inside’ this poem with Heaney, listening to the wind outside. The poem finishes also with a final reflection:

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear

For me, the voice of the poet, the position of the reader, it’s like we’re the “we” together, like we’re with Heaney listening to the wind outside. It finishes as it starts with a kind of commentary on the wind. Much of the poem is focused on us and on our reactions, despite the title being “Storm on the Island”. Apart from the earlier bits where we had the enjambment and the monosyllabic words about the sea, and a few lines about the wind, it is glued together with a kind of personal reflection on them, a commentary if you will, as if the poet is justifying or explaining things to us. It is not so much about the storm as it is about the preparations of the community, the way the community live to counteract the storms, which sound like a regular occurrence.

In the next post, I’ll look at the way that Heaney uses language and imagery in this poem, exploring how he uses words, sounds and ideas as well as the effect that they have.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

 

An analysis of the form, structure and voice of Exposure by Wilfred Owen

In the last post, I looked at the two contextual influences on Wilfred Owen’s poem Exposure which appears in the AQA GCSE English Literature anthology section, Power and Conflict. We saw how the poem was written in a world where many more freedoms in terms of form and structure were available to Owen, choices that he can make about how he sets his ideas out on the page, how he arranges them, that were not accorded to Tennyson, for example. Although Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth and Tennyson all had structural choices to make, they certainly did not have the freedom of Owen.

We saw also how the contextual setting of World War One was relevant also to an understanding of Exposure, although there are few direct references to which war. As we look at the language of the poem in the next post, we’ll see also how much or how little there is to do with the war itself, and where the conflict in the poem lies.

In terms of form, we have eight verses of five lines: a regular structure. I hesitate to say it is written in five-line quintains. It is, of course. There are five lines in each verse. But the last line of each verse hangs, suspended, tacked on at the end. It seems almost as if there are four lines to each verse, and then a refrain. It’s not a refrain at the end, either. Not exactly. It’s a refrain four times, then four variations. The repeated refrain, “But nothing happens.” is interesting in itself. This phrase echoes through the poem, the thread that binds it. The repetition of the idea emphasises the inertia, this sense of paralysis. As we see in other parts of the poem, the fact that “nothing happens” gives Owen a sense of foreboding, of dread. It doesn’t seem right. The silence in itself becomes something to be afraid of. The lifelessness, the stillness, is eerie and uncanny: something that just doesn’t feel right to Owen. Repeating that line emphasises that inertia, the wait.

That fifth line dangles there, at the end of each verse, like an appendage, It’s emphasised too by its position on the page, that it is indented, truncated, seeming almost unfinished. That leaves us wondering why he has left this line, just handing there – it seems like it reflects quite perfectly that sense of suspension.

The rest of the lines have a loose syllabic length, never longer than fourteen syllables, never fewer than 11. These long lines also give the poem a sense of a slow hum, a continuousness, almost a monotony. That loose regularity creates a sense of normality that is only offset by two things: the half-rhyme/para-rhyme and that short refrain at the end of each verse. You have this superficial normality and then when you scratch the surface, it’s not normal at all.

When you start to look at the rhyme, you hear that eerie sound: “knive us/nervous”, “silent/salient” – it isn’t quite right. There are both half rhymes and para-rhymes here. Half-rhyme the broad term for all wordsin poetry where only the final consonant sounds sound alike, like “stormy” and “army”. Here, it’s only the “mee” sound at the end of the word that rhymes. Para-rhyme is more than that, where all the consonant sounds are the same, but the vowels are different, like the n—vus sound of “knive us” and “nervous” that change because of the “i” sound in one and the “er” sound in the other. In places, it is less clear, with “fruit/afraid” and in others it is perfect rhyme, with “glozed” and “closed”.

In the verse where the rhyme is more perfect, we see the poem drifts to another scene: home. It recalls the fires, images such as the “dark-red jewels” and the notion of home. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence to me that when he starts writing (and dreaming) of home, of fires, the rhyme becomes more perfect.

The rest of the time, that eerie para-rhyme makes the poem seem strange, uncanny, like a dream world. The sounds are disconnected, strange, unnatural. Para-rhyme and half-rhyme work even better than non-rhyme for this – how else do you recreate that strange “half right” kind of sound? It’s jarring and dischordant, creating a sound that is not quite right.

Another thing we might notice about the form are the use of the ellipsis ( … ) We have this a number of times in the poem, where the lines drift off. He also uses the — for the same effect. It creates an effect that the thoughts are stitched together, held together only by the verse and the poem itself, rather like stream-of-consciousness. It helps create that sense of drifting from one line to the next, from one idea to the next, from one moment to the next. There are gaps, but we can’t predict what is in those gaps, what thought might have once filled them.

Most of the lines are enjambed into the next, end-stopped only where you would expect, either with a full stop at the end of the verse, or at the end of the line. There are two notable exceptions to this, where a full-stop falls in the middle of the line. One follows “Deep into grassier ditches” in the fifth verse and forms a change fom the “snow-dazed” men and their sleep, emphasising hypothermia setting in. It happens also in the final verse, to leave the sentence “All their eyes are ice,” hanging at the end of the line. Both times it happens, it causes us to focus more on the meaning, why Owen would want to emphasise the words that precede or follow this disruption in the rhythm.

For the enjambment, most falls in natural places where you might expect it to fall, except for one or two places where the meaning from the first part of the lines is broken off by the line break, leaving us hanging. We see this in the way “her melancholy army” is split from its verb, “attacks once more”, leaving us waiting for the sense of be completed. It leaves the line incomplete and drives us forward. We get this also with “glozed/With crusted-dark red jewels” where the word “glozed” is dangling at the end of the line. It contributes, too, to the sense of ‘train-of-thought’ or stream-of-consciousness.

That gives you a good range of things you could discuss the effect of for the form, from the para-rhyme, half-rhyme and that half fifth line to the use of caesura and enjambment, which we’ll look at in more detail at the relevant bits when we look at language.

When I think about structure, I’m thinking about the following:

How the ideas are organised and sequenced, viewpoint/perspective (third person? First person?) TiP ToP – Time Place Topic Person – shifts? Shift in time? Place? Why are the ideas in this order? External actions (happenings) vs internal thoughts? Circular structure? Beginning, middle, end? How does the title weave through the poem? Does the ending link back or develop from the opening?

Structure is the arrangement and sequence of the ideas, as well as some other aspects. I ask myself why here and not there?

The poem’s title could refer both to the exposed position of the Salient, how it sticks out into enemy territory, but also refers to the weather, how vulnerable the men are. For me, it also has other meanings, as “Exposure” means the revealing of something. We ask “what is revealed in the poem?” and for me the answer seems to be the way that Owen’s views and thoughts are revealed.

“Our brains ache” is the first line of the poem, using a collective voice, the first person plural: Owen speaks on behalf of the men, as if he knows what is in their minds too. It’s no wonder he became the poetic voice of the war, since he speaks for all the soldiers there with that collective voice. It’s a voice that is sustained through the whole poem. Every single verse contains the reference to the collective voice: it is as if the soldiers are of one mind. Not only do we get Owen’s subjective experience, but we get the fact that he is speaking for the other voiceless soldiers there too. He is part of the narrative and we get his experiences. In reality, it is a first person who sees into the minds of all the other soldiers, seeing the world through their eyes too. It’s an unusual perspective but one that allows him to speak on behalf of the other men and to present an experience that is personal, yet not unique to himself. Still, we have no idea how many “we” might refer to: it could be two or two thousand. Owen uses this technique regularly in his poetry, and viewpoint is something he experiments with often. Rarely are the poems his voice, and his alone. Sometimes, they are third person, seeing the soldiers objectively from an observational point of view. Sometimes they are about unnamed individuals, the “Unknown Soldier” who represents all soldiers. Occasionally, they are Owen’s own perspective. It is not unusual for him to take this first person plural view though.

We have the present tense, too, lending it an immediacy. This is current and real, the effect to give it a sense of an ‘eternal’ moment – it is never over. In that way, with the vague “we” and the timelessness, this is a poem that is about many battles, many wars, many conflicts.

We get some contextual details about the setting, how this may be the Ypres Salient, how the war “rumbles” on “northward”, this may be dawn, it is most certainly winter.

As we look at the structure, much of it is focused on the current conditions, until we get to the sixth verse, where the “forgotten dreams” transport the soldiers home, to warmth, but then says “on us the doors are closed” which brings the men back to their reality: this frozen battlefield. In verse seven, Owen reflects as he does in other poems on what the war means for those who believe in God. Instead of a paradise promised for faith and belief, the men’s future – their immediate future – is clear in the eighth voice which speculates about the future, how “this frost will fasten on this mud and us” and the burying party will come to dispose of the dead. There is no paradise in Owen’s poem, only the warmth of home, which is now left to the mice. The structure moves us from the present to the future, continuing a little with that sense that Owen himself has the power to go into the future, or into other minds. It is the poet who has the power to do that, not God. The structure reminds us that this battle against the elements is not over, that it will bring many casualties. The fact that we pass from dawn to “tonight” is also interesting – the poem encompasses a whole day in which nothing happens other than the men daydreaming and trying to come to grips with the futility and pointlessness of their own existence. It’s a long way from the heroism of the soldiers in The Charge of the Light Brigade.

True to Owen’s form, there are a number of questions he poses in the poem, getting us to think about the wider implications of the war itself. It is a device he uses often in his poetry – and we have one here, half-way through. “Is it that we are dying?” as hypothermia seems to set in.

By the end, then, the title no longer seems to mean just the weather, and how exposed the soldiers are to the elements, but how that contemplation of life and death has left Owen sure that “love of God seems dying”, exposing their beliefs behind it all.

In the next post, I’ll look at the way Owen uses language and imagery for effect in Exposure, exploring how context, form and structure link with the ideas he expresses.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.

 

Understanding the context of Exposure by Wilfred Owen

As we come to the fifth poem in AQA’s GCSE English Literature “Power and Conflict” section of the poetry anthology, we see a turn from the futile glory of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and a turn in style. Poetry had changed by the time Wilfred Owen was writing, and Exposure is affected by changes in poetry as much as it was affected by World War I. In this article, I’ll be exploring some of those changes in art, music and poetry, as well as looking at the specific context itself.

When we left the high Victorians with Tennyson in 1854, poetry was largely still poetry. It had verses and rhythms and rhyme schemes. Poetry had rules that people hadn’t broken yet. Art, music, sculpture, poetry… it was all still recognisably governed by the rules that we still think govern creative forms.

Art looked like this:

Here she is, the Lady of Shalott, an 1882 rendition of one of Tennyson’s most famous characters. Looks like a painting, right?

And here’s Vassily Kandinsky’s 1912 painting, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II) 

So… that happened in the art world in 30 years…

This is what happened in music. Here’s Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which was written in 1880.

Sounds like classical music, right? Listen from 11.36 if you want a famous bit!

And this is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring from 1913. Feel free to dive in a bit around 5 minutes.

Kind of dischordant, right? And then some!

And in sculpture? A Frederic Leighton sculpture from the early 1890s

Still looks like sculpture, right?

Here’s Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917

Yes, it’s a urinal on its side.

So as you can see, art, music and sculpture underwent quite radical changes in Europe from the late Victorian years of the 1890s. By 1910, rule-breaking and abstraction had become the norm.

Now, the old GCSE syllabus from days gone by would have you believe that World War I was the kind of prime mover in all that. We had pre-1914 writers and post-1914 writers – a very artificial divide that kind of intimated that the beginning of the war was the beginning of the rule breaking, when what we’d still consider ‘traditional’ art forms broke their boundaries.

The war was absolutely not the cause behind the changes though, despite the fact all that civil unrest might well have been. The fact is that very talented pioneers in the arts began breaking boundaries. We saw Elizabeth Barrett Browning begin to do it in her poetry. You can also see it in Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins among others.

So by the time we get to Wilfred Owen, writing the bulk of his poetry (or his well-known poetry) after his meeting with another war poet Siegfried Sassoon in late 1917, we’ve got a poet who comes into a world which is already falling apart, figuratively speaking, and into this world, we find writers using poetry to document the war. Arguably the greatest of those poets is Wilfred Owen, who found poetry to be the perfect vehicle for all of his reflections on war.

But Wilfred Owen is not a radical poet by any stretch of the imagination. If you are in any doubt, here are four poems written around the same time or before.

1. Ezra Pound’s Imagist Epic, In a Station of the Metro. You’re going to love it in the same way you might love a urinal as a sculpture. 1913.
2. Gertrude Stein’s freaky poetry-prose, Tender Buttons. Because if In a Station of the Metro didn’t show you how much poetry had changed, you maybe need something a little… less poetry? 1914.
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover. Because it starts earlier than the Avant Garde and Imagists. 1877.
4. T. E. Hulme’s poem The Embankment. Written around 1908 – 1909.

So when we read Owen, we shouldn’t think that his poetry’s form and structure is only influenced by the fractured times in which he lived. Art had changed significantly by the time Owen came along. As to why poetry had changed so much … that’s a little harder to pin down. We had a few isolated pioneers like Dickinson, Hopkins and Whitman who did their own thing, a few under the influence, like Baudelaire and Rimbaud in France. These emerging changes came from all over the globe, most in isolation, and perhaps their pioneering style showed people that they didn’t have to stick to the rules if they had a point to make. The sound effects of poetry became a vehicle in themselves for expression in ways that we saw the beginnings of in Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. 

Owen’s poetry reflects the trends in poetry as much as it reflects the world of war about which he wrote.

As for Owen himself, he came late to the war, signing up for the Artists’ Rifles on the 21st October 1915, over fifteen months after war had broken out. He’d lived in France since September 1913, teaching English, and he met with a number of French and English poets and had already started writing poetry. He left for the Manchester Regiment on 18th June, 1916 following his training. On 29th December 1916, he arrived at Etaples in France. In January 1917, he assumed command of his platoon after what had essentially been 18 months of training exercises. Many of the big pushes had already happened, such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Verdun. Although reportage might have been thin, there’s no doubt Owen knew what the battlefields were like. In his first month, he had two rotations on the front line. The first six months of 1917 saw Owen rotating in and out of the front lines with his battalion and on May 2nd 1917, he was evacuated with shell shock, what we would today call post-traumatic stress. By Christmas, he returned to France. He didn’t see much active duty until later in the year. By September 1918, he was back in the Somme Valley in France, rotating attacks on the Germans.

On the 4th November 1918, Wilfred Owen died, seven days before the Armistice was signed that brought an end to the war.

He has become the voice in many ways for the war: there’s little doubt that his earlier poetry and his non-war stuff would have passed without note into the annals of history. However, the way in which he described the war was so evocative that many other, talented war poets pale in comparison. It’s into this context that Exposure comes. We should remember, too, that Owen didn’t just write poems about war – even in hospital suffering from shell shock, he wrote lots of other poems too.

The poem itself appears to be set in the “Salient”, in Ypres, a part of Belgium. In military terms, a ‘salient’ is a bulgey bit in the dividing line between the two forces. It’s a very vulnerable position because it is a bit like a peninsula into enemy territory, where you are surrounded on three sides by enemy forces. The Ypres Salient was the scene of a number of battles, including the Spring Offensive, which Owen uses as the title of another poem. However, that interpretation is based on Owen’s use of the word “salient” which he uses as a pun (we’ll explore that when we’re looking at language) and in any case, it says “our memory of the salient” which, with its small ‘s’ and reference to a memory might not mean that the poem is set in the Ypres Salient at all.

In itself, it is not one of Owen’s poems that is most frequently studied. It has none of the bitter anger and violent imagery of Dulce et Decorum Est. It has none of the sadness, the pathos of The Sentry. And it has none of the careful choice of words as Futility or Anthem for Doomed Youth. It captures a different kind of war, a war that seems almost to be against a different enemy, against the world itself. This is a war within a war – a battle against Dawn, against the cold, against the snow, against the silence. The conflict itself then is not the war, but the battle to keep sane, to stay alive, to fight off the weather and inertia.

In terms of context, what you need a grasp of before considering the poem in itself is that the rules of poetry had very much changed since the times of Tennyson. What had been a few lone pioneers breaking rules had become the Avant Garde. It’s ironic in many ways that the term Avant Garde is one stolen from the battlefield: it refers to the front-line troops in war, but means also in this sense a radical battle against all that was traditional. Wilfred Owen in this poem is more free to pick and choose the aspects of form, rhythm, rhyme and structure that best suit him rather than being restricted by the verse itself (something we see in London, for instance, in which Blake’s words are as ‘chartered’ as the River Thames and the streets themselves, his words as locked down by the form and structure as the minds of the people that surround him). It’s going to be interesting to explore the effects of those freedoms on Exposure and see how Owen is making choices that support the ideas within his poem.

The other aspect of context that I am sure many students will refer to will be that of the war. However, this is a poem in which World War One is “a dull rumour”, “some other war”, and that in itself makes it difficult to refer to the war as context.

As with all things contextual, your examiners will not be looking for a biography of Owen, a treatise on changes in the Arts, or a history essay about the war. In short, they won’t be looking for you to write the kinds of things I’ve written here. Still, it’s important that you know these things so that you can consider how they influence what Owen has written and so that you can explain the impact of context in your exam response.

Next time, I’ll look at the form and structure of Exposure and explore how this links with the ideas in the poem.

If you are interested in a one-to-one lesson with me to find out more about the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, please send me an email via the website or Facebook and get in touch. Skype sessions start from £15 for one hour. You can have as many sessions as you feel like you need.