Best Books Study Work Guide: Poems From All Over Gr 11 HL. Lynne Southey
built on real worth. Here he may mean that the path they have to tread, their lives, is “vile”, evil, bad.
Contextual questions
1.Identify the alliteration in the first stanza and explain how it adds to the meaning. (2)
2.What reasons can the people in the poem have for not wanting the “they” to know their true feelings, do you think? (3)
3.Your anthology gives the meaning of “guile” (line 3) as cunning, slyness, cleverness at tricking people. In what way can the mask be seen in this negative light? (3)
4.How does the speaker’s use of the word “dream” in the second-last line add to the meaning being expressed? (3)
5.In what way do you see a similarity between the “we” of the poem and the situation in South Africa until the late 1990s? (4)
(15)
| Enrichment activity•Research what life was like for African Americans at the time.•Research the freedom movement of people such as Martin Luther King in the USA.•Research the punishment that was inflicted on African Americans by, for example, the Ku Klux Klan. |
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
(See p. 24 in Poems From All Over)
| Title: | The thrush is only mentioned in stanza 3, as a sign of hope after much gloom. The title could therefore mean that despite the gloomy mood, there is always hope. |
| Theme: | Despair |
| Mood: | Gloomy and then hopeful, with a reversion to gloomy. |
Discussion
The speaker in the poem is leaning on a gate outside, in the evening of a winter day. It is the last day of the first year of the new century. Hardy’s mood is sombre and he feels hopeless. His description of the winter landscape around him, with its signs of death and decay, mirrors his mood. And then a thrush, a bird with a beautiful voice, breaks out in song. The thrush itself seems old and battered and yet it sings with such joy, such hopefulness. The poet ends by saying that the bird might be aware of a cause for hope, but he himself is not. The poem is as beautiful as the bird’s song, but the descriptions it contains are as bleak as the speaker himself feels.
The poem has four stanzas of eight lines each with alternating rhyme (abab, etc.) so the structure is formal. This links with the contained way in which the speaker expresses his despair. Wordsworth said that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, an expression of something the poet felt and is now calmly writing about. Hardy’s poem is written in the past tense and seems to fit this description.
Analysis
| Stanza | Comment | |
| 1 | The speaker is in a contemplative mood as he leans on a gate and looks around him. There is frost and evidence of winter. The sun is setting (“The weakening eye of day”) (line 4). Looking up through the stems of the creeper, the speaker imagines that they are the broken strings of an instrument. There are no other people out as all have gone inside to the warmth of their fires. | The speaker seems isolated in the bleak landscape. Others have gone into their warm homes where their families presumably are also. Notice how the choice of words adds to the sense of death and decay (“spectre”, “dregs”, “desolate”, “broken”, “haunted”). These not only describe what the speaker sees around him, but also his feelings. |
| 2 | The previous century (1800s) is personified as dead, its burial place (“crypt”) (line 11) is the cloudy sky, the winds are singing a lament as one does for a person. The old impulse towards renewal and growth seems to have withered (“shrunken hard and dry”) (line 4) and not exist any longer. The speaker compares all that he sees, the gloom, lack of renewal and growth, the winter scene, with his own feelings or rather lack of feeling. His spirit seems to have withered and died too. | Personification of the century, and the wind gives them a kind of power and will.Notice how the desolate landscape has become the “corpse” (line 10) of the past century. There is no impulse towards regrowth, or recreation. Perhaps the speaker/poet feels this about himself and his work, that he has dried up and has nothing left to write about. Here, “spirit” (line 15) seems to refer to everything that usually renews itself.Notice how the first stanza starts with “I” and the second ends with “I” (line 16). The “I”s thus bracket the stanzas, in which the speaker has been focused on himself, seeing his own mood in all around him. |
| 3 | Suddenly (“At once”) (line 17) a bird begins to sing in the naked branches (“bleak twigs”) (line 18) of a tree. The sound is joyous and passionate (“full-hearted”). Then the speaker describes the thrush, which after all reflects the death and decay of everything else. It is old, thin, small, its feathers blown about by the wind. And yet it “flings” its song out as if singing its heart out (“soul”) (line 23) into the darkening evening. | This stanza signifies a break from the previous two with the speaker focusing on the thrush, a sign of joy and hope and life, contrasting with the previous two stanzas. But the description of the poor thrush tempers this somewhat – it too will die soon (it is “aged”) (line 21).Notice the “chosen”, giving the bird will to express its unlimited joy.Apart from the description of the bird, the speaker continues his gloomy outlook with the words “bleak” and “growing gloom” (line 24) (notice the alliteration and the mournful “ow” and “oo” sounds). |
| 4 | Speaking from his own gloomy point of view, the speaker cannot see that the bird has any reason for joy (“so little cause”) (line 25), given what he can see around him (“written on terrestrial things”) (line 27), both far and near. He thinks it must be hope of something in the future that makes the bird sing so joyously. But alas, the speaker has no such hope and cannot think (“[is] unaware”) (line 32) of any reason for hope. | Although the thrush expresses joy, this does not bring hope or relief to the speaker. He can see no reason for it. He is in despair, where there is no hope.The word “terrestrial” points to earthly things, the physical elements, what the speaker sees around him, and which he has so gloomily described.The word “trembled” (line 29) in relation to hope gives it a fragile, delicate meaning. Hope is also personified, but is not something the speaker feels. |
Contextual questions
1.The diction (word choice) of the poem means that when read aloud the sounds of the words add to the meaning in the poem. Explain, with reference to the poem what this statement means. (5)
2.Normally when one looks at a winter scene, what is it that could bring hope? Quote from the poem in support of your answer. (2)
3.Why is “fervourless” a good choice of word in the context of the poem? (3)
4.In what way is the song of the thrush described as so unexpected and opposite, given the context of the poem? Quote a phrase from the poem in your answer. (3)
5.Can one ascribe a little something positive to the speaker by the end of the poem? Refer to the last two lines. (2)
(15)
In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
(See p. in 27 Poems From All Over)
| Title: | The title situates the poem in an underground station used by commuters in a city. |
| Theme: | There is beauty in people even in the drab urban city. |
| Mood: | Appreciative, observant, thoughtful. |
Discussion
The haiku links faces in a crowd in the metro to the petals of flowers. These are two very different, unlike things and part of the delight of the poem is their juxtaposition (placing together). The poet does not write that the faces look like petals, he leaves that connection to the reader to make. There is also no speaker in the poem, there is no person looking at the faces and thinking that they look like petals.
The reader is not sure if the petals have fallen off the flowers and are stuck to the dampness of the branch, or if the branch has flowers growing from it. Flowers, like people, live for a while and then die. The life of both is transient and not permanent.
The