Best Books Study Work Guide: Poems From All Over Gr 11 HL. Lynne Southey

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СКАЧАТЬ United States of America at the time. This background knowledge lets us interpret the poem in a certain way.

      The speaker speaks for his people, the oppressed descendants of the slave population. The face these people present to the world hides their suffering and unhappiness. They fear that to show their true feelings would cause more punishment to be inflicted on them. They pretend (“[T]his debt we pay to human guile”) to be happy. He continues by describing what it is they are hiding behind their masks: their suffering. They cry out to Christ (Christian beliefs) in their pain, but do not show it to the world.

      The idea in the poem can also be generalised to all who suffer and hide their suffering. This could apply to all oppressed people and even to individuals.

      The poem has three stanzas of uneven length (stanza 1 – five lines, stanza 2 – four lines and stanza 3 – six lines), with the rhythm and repetition typical of a song. There is rhyme but it is not regular. This supports the meaning of the poem: it seems a song, but is not, just as the people seem happy, but are not.

      Analysis

Stanza		Comment
1	The masks (the false faces) that the “we” of the poem show, hide their faces (cheeks and eyes). They present a face of happiness. Their true feelings are expressed in “With torn and bleeding hearts”, indicating their deep suffering. The word “mouth” means their words when they speak. These are also lies, spoken in many ways (with “myriad subtleties”). The speaker is saying they have to hide the truth of their feelings and act as if they are happy. He doesn’t give a reason for this but it is understood that it is necessary for them to continue living without further harm or punishment.	The speaker speaks in a straightforward manner, making his meaning clear. The grin is the mask, the lie. The truth is the “torn and bleeding hearts”. This image gives an intense picture if we imagine it literally.(“[B]leeding heart” has come to mean something different today: someone with a bleeding heart feels something on behalf of someone else, often excessively.)
2	The second stanza contains a question, a rhetorical question that needs no answer. He asks why they would reveal the true state of how they feelings.The “world” is linked with “them”, pointing to an “us” and “them” opposition, the oppressed and the oppressors. He affirms that the “we” will only show “them” the mask.	Notice the rhyming first two lines: “wise / sighs” which is the same rhyme as in the first and third stanzas (“lies / eyes” and “cries / arise”). These sounds connect the ideas in the three stanzas, which are also basically the same, and at the same time add to the lyrical quality of a song. And then the refrain confirms this quality.Note “over-wise” not just “wise”. The word implies to know more than you need to.
3	“We smile” is repeated as in line 4 and opposed with “cries” at the end of the line. The smile has come to stand for the mask, the falseness of what they show. The cry to Christ is heart-rending, the idea of their suffering made worse with the words “tortured souls”. They walk a long distance, figuratively (not literally) but the “clay” under their feet is “vile”.	This stanza adds their cries to heaven as further evidence of their torture and suffering.The slaves in real life did sing, what we know today as “Negro spirituals”.Clay in its figurative sense usually means something not solid, as in “feet of clay”, not being 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”) СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 > В конец