GCSE English Literature - Belonging Anthology Content

To My SIster (William Wordsworth)

The speaker remarks that it is the first day of Spring, before encouraging his sister to abandon her work and spend the day enriching their hearts and minds by spending time absorbing the splendour of natural beauty.

Sunday Dip (John Clare)

Describes the joys and sense of adventure experienced by boys playing in the water on a Sunday.

Mild the Mist Upon the Hill (Emily Bronte)

After a day of rain and sadness, the weather prompts the speaker to reflect on their childhood, blurring the lines between past and present.

Captain Cook - To My Brother (Letitia Landon)

The poem is directed to the speaker’s brother, and reflects on their shared love of Captain Cook’s writings and the imaginative play which this spawned in their childhood.

Clear and Gentle Stream (Robert Bridges)

Describes a speaker's experience when he returns to a special place (beside a stream, under the boughs of a tree) from his boyhood.

I Remember, I Remember (Thomas Hood)

This poem is dedicated to the speaker’s nostalgic memory of childhood. Hood's childhood was a time of great happiness (one which he cannot return to), whilst his adulthood was plagued with ill health.

Island Man (Grace Nichols)

Every morning the man from the Caribbean island wakes up hearing the sound of the blue ocean in his mind. The island man drags himself out of bed. It’s just another day in London.

We Refugees (Benjamin Zephaniah)

Explores the ease at which someone can be forced to leave their country, and the fact that we ‘all came from refugees’.

Peckham Rye Lane (Amy Blackmore)

The speaker is taking a bus ride through Peckham on a hot day and describes the scenes she sees. Peckham Rye Lane is a busy market street with a wide range of food stalls and traders. It is busy, sweaty and smelly.

Us (Zaffar Kunial)

The text is, in fact, a love poem, perhaps one that is about lover who live on distant shores, although we are not made aware of this until the final tercet. Prior to this, it appears a mediation on identity, and how the collective identities we form often, paradoxically, are defined by the exclusion of the other.

In Wales, Wanting to be Italian (Imtiaz Dharker)

The speaker recalls their thoughts and feelings on growing up in Wales and expresses a desire for a different identity: to be someone else, acting differently, in a more exotic and exciting environment. The poem has a nostalgic and humorous tone as the speaker asks questions but is obviously recalling their own experience of adolescence.

Kumukanda (Kayo Chingonyi)

Stanza 1: The speaker did not complete the initiation (to cross the river and thereby kill the boy); thus, his tribe would consider him unfinished (not yet a man)
Stanza 2: Instead, he was raised in England, and he grew up gradually, by caring for and burying a dead mum, receiving not affection but an understanding that stoic repression was masculine.
Stanza 3: He wonders what would the alternate version of himself would make of him, speaking and writing in another tongue than that of all his ancestors, who were men in the sense that they had completed their initiation.

Jamaican British

The speaker describes his experiences of being mixed race, and how the contradictions of his Jamaican and British upbringing have impacted upon his sense of self.

My Mother’s Kitchen

This poem can, in some sense, be read as a very specific, intimate account of the displacement that the poem ‘We Refugees’ explores. The speaker’s mother - a refugee who has been displaced no fewer than 8 times - is preparing to return to the land in which she was born. The speaker reflects on the effects of a life of displacement on her mother, in terms of her virtues but also what’s been lost.

Emigree

The speaker reflects on her memories of the homeland she was forced to leave as a child, and how her experience there has shaped her relationship to the present.