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

提示A mission with no return journey.

为什么Japan 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

提示He looks down, not ahead.

为什么The 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

提示He was there and not there.

为什么First 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

提示The man himself is silent.

为什么The 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

提示Two fates are being compared.

为什么One 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

提示Every verse is the same length.

为什么The 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

提示Look at who decided what he learned.

为什么He 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

提示Think about whose rules he is refusing.

为什么Agard 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

提示It sounds as a playground rhyme does.

为什么The 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

提示She nursed soldiers in the Crimean War too.

为什么The 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

提示The opposite of being kept in the dark.

为什么One 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

提示He stops listing what he was told and says what he is doing.

为什么The 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

提示The same number as in each of the other two clusters.

为什么One 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

提示It is part of a much longer autobiographical poem.

为什么Both 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

提示The work of art is a painting behind a curtain.

为什么A 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

提示The man was a pilot.

为什么A 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

提示Its poet was the Poet Laureate of the day.

为什么Tennyson 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

提示Neither man is in danger any longer.

为什么One 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.