Planner

Wednesday 21 January	Introduce To Kill a Mockingbird + Presentation Themes   “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence, poetry anthology   Finish “Hide and Seek”by Vernon Scannell, poetry anthology
Thursday 22 January	« Prayer Before Birth » by Louis MacNeice   To Kill a Mockingbird
Wednesday 28 January	“The Last Night” by Sebastian Faulks   If by Rudyard Kipling   To Kill a Mockingbird
Thursday 29 January	Themes in TKAM
Wednesday 6 February (Mrs Woods)	“Telephone Call” by Wole Soyinka   Writing an Argumentative Paper
Thursday 7 February (Mrs Woods)	Comparative Poetry Revising For IGCSE
Lundi 09/02 - room 210 10-12:15 English Language A Paper 1: Written paper 2h 15m   2-3:30 English Language A Paper 2: Written paper 1h 30m	Mardi 10/02 - room 210 8 - 9:45 English Literature Paper 1: Drama and Prose 1h 45m   10h-12h Maths sans Frontières   2-3:30 English Literature Paper 2: Unseen Texts and Poetry Anthology 1h 30m

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek

by Vernon Scannell

This poem is, on the surface, about a man remembering how he played hide and seek as a boy. Underneath that initial memory, though, the speaker is exploring his ideas about loneliness and how it feels to be abandoned, and even to die.

Literary Techniques

Single stanza poem

First and second person narrative

Some rhyming couplets: out/shout (lines 4/5) and coat/throat (lines 19/20)

Alliteration helps the tone of the reader's voice to fluctuate between excitement ('c'), oppressive ('d'), and to capture the sounds of the sea.

The single (unbroken stanza) and the sound of the sea could lead one to talk about the relentless flow of the sea..  and the relentless movement of childhood experience towards adult understanding)

Alliteration of 'd' : 'dark dank' creates a heavy, oppressive tones

Alliteration of 'c' : 'call out, call out' creates a sense urgency, almost like a bird cry.

Alliteration of the 's': 'smells like seaside'  and 'smells of sand'(the sound of the waves and wind?)

Sibilance  (repeated 's' sound) of 's' throughout poem (sound of the sea..)

Personification; "The darkening garden watches...." and "the bushes hold their breathe" - creates the ominous feeling that the nature world is waiting quietly and so participating in the experience. There is no joy in this wait... for the garden is 'darkening.'

Concept and Themes

Who didn't/doesn’t enjoy playing hide and seek? Do you remember the feeling of hiding in the cupboard, holding your breath, stopping the giggles, in a darkness that seemed at once soft and a bit scary?

Scannell encourages us to remember such memories and to layer them into his poem.

Be careful, though, the poem is asking you to do more than just experience the game with the boy. Scannell requires of us that we seek the message hidden within the three stages of the boy's experience: 1) the tension of hiding from children who 'prowl' 2) the joy of declaring oneself a winner 3) the hollow emptiness of realising one has been abandoned.

Themes: childhood, excitement, loneliness, nostalgia for childhood friends, death (?).

Voice:

First person narrator: The first person narrator is writing from the perspective of 'I'

Second person narrator: the second person narrator speaks to the main character as 'you.' This allows the reader to 'become/imagine they are' the main character.

In this poem we have to find out who is hiding in the poem. Is it an older person speaking to a younger version of himself? Is it an invisible, even internal, presence advising the child? Either way, we have to question why this second person narrator is interested in telling the experience and talking to the boy.

First Person (I)

Call out, call out loud -

"I"m ready. Come and find me"

The juxtaposition of the desire to call out loud when you're meant to be quiet captures the double-bind of the game: the need to hide and the desire to be found, to be noticed, to exist.

There is the possibility that he shouts these words, as later on the speaker advises "better not risk another shouting." If the boy did shout these words ('"I'm ready. Come and find me.") then he was taking "a risk." This possibility increases the sense of fear and anticipation.

Second Person

Now look again at 'call out'.' This is written by someone speaking to the boy.... but then, no, also to us:

You mustn't sneeze...

Be careful that you're feet aren't sticking out...

Don't breathe, don't move, stay dumb 

This advice is both logical and yet also a little creepy: stay dumb.

A person who is dumb is someone who is unable to speak, who is mute. In this way, the speaker no longer has control over his own voice.

At the same time, 'don't breathe...dumb' is an example of parataxis - when clauses, sentences are aligned without conjunctions like and or but. Here it creates an impression of urgency and the idea that the speaker is controlling the boy.

At the same time, the voice tells 'us':

And here they are, whispering at the door,

You've never heard them so hushed before.

Think: why would the children hunting have to be so quiet? What are they afraid of? If someone is 'hushed' it implies they have been told to be quiet or that something is making them be quiet. Are they frightened to enter the shed? 

Is the boy hiding in a place which frightens children?

Physical discomfort

Your legs are stiff, cold bites through your coat, 

dank dark smell of sand moves in your throat.

Look at the writer's choice of words. The cold is personified and is biting through 'your' coat... and the image of the stiff legs and sand in 'your' throat is deadly in its implications. Is the speaker suggesting that the boy (you) is metaphorically  buried in the dark silence of his wooden box/shed/coffin? Remember, he is told to "Hide in (his) blindness." Coupled with the idea he is "mute"... and we have a very dark image of the boy.

Uncurling

The ending is anticlimactic.... because he has been abandoned.

Yet, the realisation is dark and the second person speaker steps back with the full force of adult maturity.  Read the last 7 lines:

"It's time to let them know you are the winner

Push off the sacks, uncurl and stretch

That's better. Out of the shed and call to them -

I've won! Here I am! Come and own up! I've caught you"

Note the excitement of the inversion. He is the 'winner' and he has caught those who were 'prowling' after him.

Very paternal feeling from the second person narrator. He feels the same relief as the boy: that's better. The line between memory and external description is very thin here... but this moment is made to be broken with the last lines:

The darkening garden watches, nothing stirs,

The bushes hold their breathe, the sun is gone 

Yes, here you are - But where are those who sought you?

Note, the last question might be to the boy, but equally (in a moment of internal monologue) it might also be the speaker asking himself

The answer lies in your interpretation of who is hiding in the poem.

A boy simply playing hide and seek... 'they' have gone back home

A memory of the second person narrator as a boy ... they are his lost childhood friends, ones who abandoned him too soon (and so left him a very lonely little boy)

Either way, the emptiness at the end of the poem echoes. The boy experiences a moment of profound loneliness ... and one that could be considered a fundamental element of any one person's life.

Imagery. 

Can you find words/description in the text which capture these contrasting images?

Dark and light

Noise and silence

Childhood pleasures and fears

Isolation as something that is both positive and negative

Half Past Two

U.A.Fanthorpe

“Half Past Two” Overview

In this poem, a young boy is held in detention by his teacher – who then forgets about him. As he waits for her to return, he effectively day-dreams. His thoughts are out-of-time, both the time of his teacher and the compound, non-numerical time of other adults in his world. He goes into ‘clockless land of ever’ through the silent act of playing with his hang-nail and the smell of the flowers on his teachers desk.

U.A. Fanthorpe (1929 - 2009)

English teacher and later administrative clerk in a mental health centre. In 2001 she was made CBE for services to poetry. She was also awarded the 2003 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Comparisons

Other poems in the anthology on the themes of childhood:

If

Prayer Before Birth

Piano

Hide and Seek

Key Points

Narrative poem

Free verse

11 stanzas of three lines

Progressive sense of understanding for reader (though you do have to move backwards and forwards through time of poem).

First person narrator: “I”

Personal thoughts presented in (parenthesis) as asides: (I forget what it was). This creates impression speaker is addressing us and emphasises that time has passed since situation took place.

Capital letters

Teacher is presented with capital S, while boy has lower case ‘h’... until line 25, when the speaker (and so the boy) reduce her to a ‘scuttling creature’ that apologises for making the boy late.

Something Very Wrong – note how the capitals suggest we can hear the teacher’s voice, strong and stern – and so the speaker is caught up in playing the parts both of the boy and his teacher. The juxtaposition of ‘Something Very Wrong’ with the speaker’s aside ((I forget what was) reduces the importance of these words, and thus the strength of the teacher.

Non-Numerical Time

The boy knows a lot of times, and they are presented in ‘compound form’ and ‘non numerical time’ to emphasize the way he has learned them: gettinguptime, timeforbed. These times contrast with ‘half-past two’ and emphasize the difference between child and adult experiences of life. The narrator understands the boy’s perspective of the world, and expects that we will too. 

Personification (also very poetic language)

Clock face, two little eyes, long legs for walking (what a horrible, mean image!)

Onomatopoeia

To click a language – logically illogical  the boy’s world does make sense, just not in ‘adult terms’

Oxymoron

Silent Noise – he goes into ‘silent noise’ and into the ‘smell of chrysanthemums’. Following adult reason, such things are impossible but, are they really?

Enjambment (run-on lines)

Often used to create a sense of breathless-ness, he has escaped!

Clockless Land of Ever

How many of us would like to live in a clockless land, where ‘time hides tick-less waiting to be born’? 

Fairytale language

Once upon a time, wicked, for ever (repeated), the idea that the teacher is reduced to ‘scuttling,’ the idea of escaping to a magical, safe land.

Tone

Nostalgic – can you feel the nostalgia for the childish, timeless world

Dreamy

Mocking of the teacher

Resources

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=157

 HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._A._Fanthorpe?oldid=0" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._A._Fanthorpe?oldid=0

http://www.poetrycan.co.uk/ 

Disabled

Disabled 

Wilfred Owen 

What can I say? You surely know the deal, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was a young English man who also lived in France, where he taught English, and sejourned in a Scotland, in a military hospital alongside fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Owen died at the close of WW1, leaving behind him poetry that is worth reading.

Indeed, in the spring of 1918, Owen's published a short collection of poems. The preface to that collection reads:  this book is not about heroes. My subject is war and the pity of war; the poetry is in the pity.

Disabled

Use your textbook (p41-44) as the information is excellent. Also, visit: http://www.wilfredowen.fr/english/

That said, a good starting point for today is to realise that although the poem clearly starts with a speaker who is looking at the disabled man, "he sat in a wheeled chair,"  we slide very quickly into the mind and memories of that said man, as he remembers how it was to feel young and ever-so alive.

The poem is interwoven with the images of evening and dusk: the idea of sleep "gathering" and "mothering" people away, the "air [growing] dim," the "glow-lamps [that] budded in the light-blue trees," "tonight," "how cold and late it is!", be[ing] put to bed," and waiting for someone to come, "why don't they come?".

Sadly, then, we realise the images of evening are metaphorical for they symbolise the idea that although "his youth" was "last year", he is at the end of his life: now, he is old. Although death might seem welcome for a man who has lost all his limbs, the speaker admits with regret that "Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, and do what the rules consider wise/ And take whatever pity they may dole." There is a clear sense of desperation, and even confusion that Death (symbolised by the nurses who are late in coming the night of the poem) is coming for him sooner: why don't they come / and put him to bed? Why don't they come.

He clearly regrets his choice to join the war:

"In the old times, before he threw away his knees" (line10),

He "poured [his colour/his blood] down shell-holes till the veins ran dry" (line 18)

He wonders why - he thought he'd better join (line 24) - I've reversed sentence order.

Note, he signed up when he was drunk and "to please his Meg."

He wanted "the smart salutes," "arms" (weapons), "leave" (holidays), "pay", "drums and cheers". He did not think of Germany, Austria nor of fear, for "no fears/ Of Fear came yet" (line 32).

He recognises the importance of how he was welcomed home: (lines 37-39): 

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.

Only a solemn man who brought him fruits

Thanked him: and then enquired about his soul.

This one man touched upon the truth of (inadequate) life. In the man's state, what else does he have but his soul?

That's a good question, because in many ways the poem seems to be an exploration of the state of the disabled man's soul.

"In the old days" (last year)

He danced with girls, held their "slim" waists, their "subtle hands"

He was painted by an "artist silly for his face" - eager to paint his face - for he looked so young.

He played football, when "after the matches" he was celebrated and so "carried shoulder-high" and able to get drunk, "drink a peg."

He'd wanted to believe, "as someone had said," that he would look "like a god in a kilt" (line 25) with "jewelled hilts", "daggers in plaided socks" (lines 32-33)

Remember, 

"He asked to join. He didn't have to beg.

Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years." (lines 27-28).

What a waste! For "tonight he noticed how the women's eyes/ Passed from him to the strong men that were whole" (liness 43-44).

And so it is that this poem is made up of coupled moments of comparison, 

youth versus old age, that "esprit de corps" (team spirit; feeling of pride) versus loneliness and regret; being carried "shoulder-high" and being in a wheel-chair, without limbs, dancing versus sitting, just sitting, in the same town at the same time of night; and, so on.

The most poignant of comparisons, for me (at least), is the memory of the "purple [which] spurted from his thigh" (line 20) when he was injured and the "blood-smear down his leg, after the matches" that "one time he liked" (line 21). In the comparison, we realise the disabled man went to war to re-experience/re-live that moment of man-ish pride. Now he no longer has legs upon which he can feel such smears of blood. Worse, the blood that "spurted" was purple, not red: unreal, monsterous, unmanly.

How can we close? I guess by thanking Wilfred Owen for leaving us with his own honest understanding of the worth of war for the individuals who dreamt of glory and found... death and destruction.



Passage to Africa

Passage to Africa

George Alagiah

The search for the shocking: the ghoulish manner of a journalist on the hunt for the most striking picture.

In this article, for once, we have a subjective travel narrative which provides us with a  behind-the-scenes perspective on the hunt for pictures that will shock, and thus please, British audiences. 

In this presentation, I will suggest that Alagaih presents himself as a hunter on the path of shocking, ghoulish images and that, to his wonder, the most striking of all the pictures he found was that of an old man's apologetic smile, for it was that one smile that made Alagaih question the relationship the richer countries have with the poorer countries. Indeed, as newspaper readers we seem to 'consume' the meat provided by the photographers with ever so little consideration for the humans that lie at their source.

Hunter

On the hunt (10)

criss-crossed Somalia (1)

a village in the back of beyond (5)

jotted down instructions (6)

on a dirt track

tramped

search for the shocking

collect and sample (18)

He is breaking a 'taboo'

Ghoulish (10)

Like a ghost village (9)

deliverance from a half life to death itself (28)

the smell if decaying flesh (30)

She was rotting (36)

sick, yellow eyes (39)

description of the degeneration of the human body (lines 38-40)

The twin evils if hunger and disease (39)

shrivelled body (49)

corpse (50)

The Hunter's Reacions

My reactions - a mixture of pity and revulsion, yes revulsion (  ).

The degeneration of the human body is a disgusting thing (  ).

The evocation of "pity" (46).

Who is He Hunting For?

The editor - pictures that stun one day abd are written off as the same old stuff the next (18)

The "people back home in the comfort of their sitting rooms" are "moved" (not physically but emotionally... but, even then, their reaction seems so little and seems to cost the world so much.

Dignity

Symbols of dignity (decency, hope, and hard work): the soiled cloth the woman pulls over herself (as a sign her dying body can still be attractive and so needs to be covered out of decency) and the hoe the dying man keeps by his bedside (as a sign he wants nothing more than to get back up and get to work).

The message he found when he was hunting for shocking images: people are dignified, even when they are no more than ghouls. The human race is human, even when it seems inhuman.

The most shocking image - "went beyond pity and revulsion."

A fleeting meeting of eyes (58)

few brief moments (54)

a smile, from a face - not a smile of joy, but a smile nonetheless.

The most shocking image was a man whose smile asked a questions, if I am embarrassed what should you be? 

The you and the we, the rich and the poor (read closing paragraph).

Conclusion

George Alagiah closes his subjective travel narrative with a strongly philosophical section that asks us, as consumers of the BBC and of the Western press, how we feel about reports from war-torn countries  and who should best be doing the apologising!

Further Research

Remember to complete the corresponding section in your textbook!

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/17/george-alagiah-family-values

http://litxpert.wordpress.com/tag/a-passage-to-africa-george-alagiah-journalism-literary-analysis-of-narrative-article/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSmxyIia0U4

http://englishtutorhome2.blogspot.fr/2013/04/analysis-passage-to-africa-george.html

Mock Exam Times

Lundi 09/02 - room 210

10-12:15 English Language A Paper 1: Written paper 2h 15m

2-3:30 English Language A Paper 2: Written paper 1h 30m

Mardi  10/02 - room 210

8 - 9:45  English Literature Paper 1: Drama and Prose 1h 45m 

    10h-12h Maths sans Frontières

2-3:30  English Literature Paper 2: Unseen Texts and Poetry Anthology 1h 30m

Good luck!

A Mother in a Refugee Camp

A Mother in a Refugee Camp

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

Where can one start if one does not start by saying that practically every English literature student on earth has read Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" - an award winning novel based on his own life experiences in Nigeria. The novel focuses both on the savagery of British colonisation and home-grown military dictators.  Achebe died in March 2013, aged 82. Google his name and you'll find what you're looking for (and all the more so if you type 'New York Time' alongside!).

A Mother in a Refugee Camp

One stanza free verse poem

Employment of sentences of varying lengths and enjambment suggests the reader has difficulty creating controlled lists of details. He talks, intimately, thoughtfully, caught up in the act of remembering. The lack of punctuation shows he doesn't know where to stop. The use of ellipsis underline when the speaker 'drifts off" as though lost in his own thoughts and grief.

In the first three line, before the use of ellipsis (...) the speaker summarizes the poem. 

No Madonna and Child could touch

Her tenderness for a son

She soon would have to forget...

This religious image instantly raises the mother and child to a religious level of exemplary purity and devotion. Remember, Mary, too, would lose her child.

The writer is clearly using pathos here to make us feel sorrow, however we should also respect the woman for the dedication she shows towards her son in times of adversity. Note, indefinite article 'a' used twice in title emphasizes the universal message of the poem: this is a mother in a refugee camp.



Pathos

The power or quality in literature to arouse feelings of pity or sorrow.

The use of ellipsis... suggests the speaker is faltering in his speech, is unable to complete the sentence and/or is using this time to recall the moment/to take us back to the moment when he first saw them.

Note, this poem is in simple past tense, which creates the sensation that the speaker visited the camp and took a photograph or video. The speaker has watched the woman and her child long enough to see the mother combing her son's hair. The poem doesn't take us up to the moment of his death, but the listener realises his death is inevitable: tiny grave.

Language

Achebe appeals to and challenges our senses to follow him into the scene:

smells; odors of diarrhea, unwashed children, dried up bottom, 

touch: tenderness, 

silent sound: humming in her eyes

sight

The images of the other children are heart wrenching: 

unwashed children with washed out ribs (how ironic, how pitifully ironic) 

and dried up bottoms waddling in laboured steps behind blown-empty bellies (starvation has actively blown their bellies empty like we would blow balloons full of air). Note the alliteration of 'b' - such alliteration holds us in place, we cannot turn away.

Try and imagine the children using Achebe's description. They children have become disjointed body parts: ribs, bottoms that waddle behind bellies. 

The Memory

You have to read the poem carefully to see that the mother, like the speaker, is transported back into a memory. As she 'held a ghost smile between her teeth' and (held) in 'her eyes the memory of a mother's pride'. What was the moment of past pride? When she 'had bathed him and rubbed him down with bare hands". Note the use of past perfect (had bathed) which indicates distant past. She has NOT just bathed him, she is remembering how proud she felt at that moment and the memory brings a 'ghost smile' to her mouth - she has to hold the smile in her teeth to keep it in place!

Inside her Mind

The speaker is presenting himself as an outsider, but here he clearly becomes omniscient, all knowing, as he is imagining the memories that caused the woman to smile. There is no indication the narrator interviewed her).

Humming in her Eyes

Like the 'ghost smile,' the humming is unusual. The woman is not humming with her mouth (there is no sound). The 'humming is in her eyes.' She's replaying the action from the past in today's world:

In their former life this was perhaps

A little daily act of no consequence

Before his breakfast and school

We are reminded that they are in a refugee camp. The son was not born poor, civil war ha displaced his family and upset his life. Also, note, we are talking about a boy and not a baby. He had breakfast and went to school.

The Little Daily Act

She took from their bundle of possessions

A broken comb and combed

The rust-coloured hair left on his skull

And then - humming in her eyes - began to carefully part it.

'their' = they belong together

'broken' = the comb is like them, broken, but she has not thrown it away

comb + combed = her action is logical

rust-coloured = obviously, metal rusts and his body is rusting away (from lack of water)

his skull = its no longer a head, but a skull

began to part it = the irony is mother and son will soon be parted / we part children's hair to make them look smart, to prepare for an outing.. and so she is preparing her son for the ultimate outing of life into death.

A Tiny Grave

Now she did it (combed and parted his hair)

Like putting flowers on a tiny grave

She has already started her mourning process. She has 'not long ceased to care' (like the other mothers). Her son's head is now a skull and so the hair decorates its deadly resting place. Note, the grave is tiny but, and I repeat myself, this poem is about a boy (who went to school) and not a baby. The grave is tiny because he, like the other children have 'washed  out ribs'.

The fact the mother has a 'ghost-smile between her teeth' clearly suggests she will soon follow him on his final journey.

Closing emotions

How can we feel anything else but admiration for the woman's sense of dignity and her undying devotion to her son, even in the face of death?

Websites:

http://www.knowledge4africa.co.za/english/poetry/refugee-mother-a.jsp

http://litxpert.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/analysis-mother-in-a-refugee-camp-chinua-achebe-2/