Unit 2: Poetry Across Time

1. Unit 2: Poetry Across Time Moon on the Tides: “Relationships” Cluster and Unseen Poetry

2. Key Information: • Exam: May 24th • Worth 35% of the English Lit GCSE • Section A: 23% • Section B: 12% • 1hour 15minutes long • Section A: 45 minutes • Section B: 30 minutes

3. Section A (36 marks):Poetry from Moon on the Tides • Organised by clusters • Ours is the Relationships cluster • Choice of two questions per cluster: choose one question • Each question will ask you to compare one named poem to a poem of your choice (from the same cluster) • 45 minutes

4. Section A: Named poems • Any of the following poems may be named on the exam so you must know them thoroughly: • ‘In Paris with You’, ‘Brothers’, ‘Sister Maude’ won’t be named, but may be the best fit for comparison.

5. Section B (18 marks): Unseen Poetry • Provided with an ‘unseen’ poem (not known in advance) • One question (no choices) • 30 minutes • Effectively tests your ability to analyse poetry independently.

7. What they’re looking for: • A skills-based approach, making a personal response to a range of poems. • You will be expected to respond to: • Themes, ideas and issues presented by the poet • Form, structure and language (including imagery and sound) • In other words, you’re analysing the themes and ideas of the poem through methods that writers use to communicate them. • Examiners want to see you making genuinely independent and thoughtful responses.

8. Poetic devices aim achieve one of the following effects: • Create an image in your head • Put a sound in your mouth • Emphasise something • Link to something • Whenever you want to talk about a poetic device, think: What is the writer trying to achieve? Which of these does it do for me? It may well be different from one person to the next.

9. From the Chief Examiner’s Report • “…it was a pleasure to see so many interesting and illuminating responses to a new anthology of poetry. This was especially true of those candidates who were equipped with the ability to respond with confidence and independence to the poems themselves as well as to the actual process and demands of a poetry examination.” • “It was particularly interesting to see the way candidates responded to unseen poetry … the responses were fresh, individual and very illuminating”

10. General Advice - don’t just list techniques • “Using technical detail as a framework and foundation for writing, rather than an aid to understanding meaning, limits candidate performance. Statements pointing out the use of enjambment for example, or the fact that a poem is written ‘in free verse’ or with ‘a rhyme scheme’ tended to lead to some rather generalised comments which offered very little in terms of developing understanding of ideas and themes. Language and technique is most successfully analysed when linked explicitly to themes and ideas rather than in isolation.”

11. General Advice - focus on key sections • “Those students who attempt to write about every line of the poem, or in other words give a blow-by-blow account, don’t generally perform as well as they might. It is impossible in the time to provide a detailed analysis of the whole poem, so students would be better linking analysis of two or three key moments / words / images to the overall thesis.”

12. AO1 - clearly identify central ideas in poem • Students who can identify, discuss and wrestle with the feelings/attitudes/ideas in the poems can achieve Bands 4 and 5 with relative ease … It may be worthwhile … to begin by writing a sentence or two summarising what the poem is about in terms of themes and ideas, which should immediately be achieving in at least Band 3.”

13. AO2 - focus on writer’s construction of ideas • “There is widespread variation in students’ ability to deal with ‘the writer’ … a large number of students … continue to write about the poems, characters and events as though they are real, lacking any evidence that they understand the texts to have been constructed by someone … The ability to try to say why some of these choices have been made lies at the heart of achievement in this strand and relates in the first instance to words …”

14. AO2 - pick out key methods that construct ideas • “A strategy of choosing a few details (quotations) from each poem and grappling with what the poet was trying to say/suggest/imply would pay dividends: even if the interpretation is somewhat debatable, the student should be accessing the Band 4 descriptor …”

15. AO3: Section A - know all the poems • “students need to know the rest of the poems in the cluster well. Examiners saw many instances where students wrote well about each of the poems individually but struggled to make meaningful comparisons owing to a poor choice of second text, thus limiting their chances of achieving well on this strand from the outset … more than one comparative comment must be made in order to access Band 3 and higher here.”

16. AO3: Section A - use brief intro to account for your choice of comparison poem • “a simple strategy of informing the examiner of the second choice of poem and the reasons why in terms which compare it to the named poem is likely to produce an opening paragraph which is already accessing Band 3 at least. If this strategy is linked to that suggested in AO1 above i.e. a comparison of the two poems in terms of themes/ideas, the student is well on the way to climbing the ladder of the mark scheme.”

17. Section A - try to link poems throughout • “Having a sound grasp of ideas enabled the most successful comparisons. Also, this enabled a comparative approach to the response itself, rather than the rather limiting ‘Poem A + Poem B + final comparative paragraph’ approach.”

18. Section A - purposeful intro and conclusion • “Introductions and conclusions tended to be rather redundant: they may enable a student to just ‘start writing’ which is useful, but don’t often lead to many marks. It might be better to start with answering the question and end with a comparative point that is more than ‘the poem I preferred was.’” • [Yes, this contradicts a point made about AO1 - but the idea is, make them sharp, short and start/sum up comparison.]

19. Section B - one read isn’t enough • “The key to doing well on Section B is to read the poem several times and this was clearly shown by one answer which began to write a rather unusual response to the poem. The student then wrote ‘When I first read this poem, I thought … but now that I have read it again, I can see that the poet is …’”