Writing about one poem

Question 27.1 asks how the poet presents an idea or feeling in one unseen poem, for example: In ‘Futility’, how does the poet present the speaker's feelings about death?

• AO1: your own response, with quotations.
• AO2: how the poet uses language, form and structure.
• 24 marks, about 30 minutes.

There are no marks for context (AO3), so you don't need to know who the poet was.

1. Do the five-minute read: title, speaker, situation, shift, ending.
2. Write a short introduction with your thesis: what feeling does the poem present, and how does it change?
3. Write three or four paragraphs, working through the poem from start to end.
4. In each, analyse a method: a word, an image, a sound, or the form and structure.
5. Track the change: the best answers show how the feeling develops.

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

5Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

10Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

Owen presents the speaker's feelings changing from fragile hope to bitter despair. The first stanza trusts ‘The kind old sun’, and this personification makes the sun seem like a gentle friend who might wake the soldier. In the second stanza, the speaker's questions grow more desperate, and the rhetorical question ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ suggests that all of human life has been pointless. By the end, the sunbeams are ‘fatuous’, or foolish: the speaker's hope has turned to anger.

• Clear answers explain the poem's meaning and some methods, with relevant quotations.
• Thoughtful, developed answers explore methods in detail, and how the feeling changes.
• Convincing, critical answers build an argument about the whole poem, and consider more than one reading.

Zoom in on single words, such as ‘fatuous’, and comment on form and structure as well as language.