Poetry, Year 11: Kamikaze, Checking Out Me History and which poems pair up (Power and Conflict option)

Fly his aircraft into an enemy ship, dying in the attack

HintA mission with no return journey.

The whyJapan used such pilots in the last stages of the Second World War. Dying this way was presented as the highest honour; coming back alive was a disgrace.

The sea, the fishing boats and the shoals of fish, which remind him of his childhood

HintHe looks down, not ahead.

The whyThe beauty of ordinary life, and memories of his own boyhood by the sea, pull against the mission. The poem never states his reason outright.

As if he were dead: they never spoke to him again

HintHe was there and not there.

The whyFirst his wife, then the neighbours, and in time his own children learned to act as if he were not there. He survived the war and lost his life anyway.

A narrator reporting what the pilot's daughter said; near the end she speaks in her own voice

HintThe man himself is silent.

The whyThe daughter is explaining her father to her own children. The man at the centre is given no voice at all.

Whether dying on the mission would have been preferable to the life he came home to

HintTwo fates are being compared.

The whyOne was a quick death in the attack; the other was the long, living death of being ignored by everyone he loved. The poem leaves the question open.

Seven stanzas of six lines each

HintEvery verse is the same length.

The whyThe orderly shape contrasts with the pilot's break from what was expected of him. Sentences run on across the stanza breaks.

That his schooling taught him British history and left out the history of Black people

HintLook at who decided what he learned.

The whyHe lists what he was told about, much of it trivial, and sets beside it the figures he was never told about. Being denied your history, he says, is being denied part of your identity.

Using his own voice instead of standard English is itself a claim to his identity

HintThink about whose rules he is refusing.

The whyAgard was born in Guyana and moved to Britain in 1977. Writing the poem in Creole and without standard punctuation resists the same authority that chose his history lessons.

Short, bouncy rhyming lines, like a childish chant

HintIt sounds as a playground rhyme does.

The whyThe sing-song rhythm makes that official knowledge sound trivial. The Black historical figures get a different treatment: slower, freer sections printed in italics.

Mary Seacole

HintShe nursed soldiers in the Crimean War too.

The whyThe poem also celebrates Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the revolution of enslaved people in Haiti, and Nanny of the Maroons, who led resistance in Jamaica.

Images of light

HintThe opposite of being kept in the dark.

The whyOne is pictured as a beacon. Against this the speaker describes his schooling as a kind of blindfold.

With the speaker declaring that he is now shaping his own identity

HintHe stops listing what he was told and says what he is doing.

The whyThe poem moves from what was done to him to what he is doing for himself. The verb he chooses suggests hard, deliberate work, like cutting a shape from solid material.

15

HintThe same number as in each of the other two clusters.

The whyOne is printed on the exam paper. You choose the second from memory, so every poem needs to be known well enough to bring in.

The extract from The Prelude

HintIt is part of a much longer autobiographical poem.

The whyBoth begin in confidence and end in fear, and both are in unrhymed verse without stanza breaks. A good pairing shares an idea and offers a contrast in how it is handled.

My Last Duchess

HintThe work of art is a painting behind a curtain.

The whyA statue in one, a portrait in the other; a king's boast in one, a duke's talk in the other. In both the man's own words condemn him.

Kamikaze

HintThe man was a pilot.

The whyA mother speaks in one and a daughter in the other. Both show that the damage of war reaches families far from any battlefield.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

HintIts poet was the Poet Laureate of the day.

The whyTennyson watches a whole brigade from outside and honours it. Hughes stays with one terrified man. The contrast in viewpoint gives a comparison plenty to say.

That the memory of what they saw will not leave them

HintNeither man is in danger any longer.

The whyOne was a soldier and took part; the other was a witness with a camera. Both poems are about the power of memory, one of the cluster's main ideas.