Poetry essay plans

Disorder - Poems

• Afterwards and Prufrok

• The Ruined Maid and Preludes

Disorder - Intro

1) Pru + A - uncertainty surrounding speaker’s abilities

2) Pru + A - Pru is present but A is potentia future

3) Ru + Pre - untidy lives of ordinary people

Disorder P1 - uncertainty + criticism

Prufrock

• “That is not what I meant at all”

• Repetition and regretful tone

• Sort of ironic

Afterwards

• “But he could do little for them and now he is gone”

• Regretful tone

• Radical politics

• Hardy’s poems are “wracked with guilt” - Mallon

Disorder P2 - time + criticism

Prufrock

• “And indeed there will be time to wonder, “Do I dare?””

• Rhetorical question

• Doubtful

• Repetition of time

Afterwards

• “When the Present has latched its posters behind my tremulous stay”

• Personification

• “Hardy is a poet that dwells on human mortality” - Davie

Disorder P3 - Ordinary lives + criticism

Ruined Maid

• “You left us In tatters” + “Some polish is gained with one’s ruin”

• Demotic language contrasted with TRM

• Surprisingly positive despite negative stereotypes

Preludes

• “Insistent feet at four and five and six o’clock” + “the morning come to consciousness”

• Repetition

• Personification

• “A feel of life happening automatically and helplessly” - Peter Howarth

Disorder - Conclusion

• disorder through self-doubt

• Cruel constraints of time

• Chaos of ordinary lives

Voices- Poems

• Tess’ Lament + A game of chess

• The Voice + Journey of the Magi

Voices - intro

1) Tess + chess - tragedy of women

2) V + J - lack of understanding

3) V + J - isolated and hostile world

Voices - tragedy + criticism

Tess

• “And it was I who did it all, did it all”

• “Make every relic of me rot”

• Repetition

• A lament

• Extreme

• “It wails with a mere that seems .. rock with an infinite sadness” - Gosse

Chess

• “The change of Philomel by the barbarous king”

• Heteroglot/multivocal

• “Arguable there is a redeeming quality to Eliot’s presentation of tragic female experiences” Tucker

Voice P2 - misunderstanding + criticism

Voice

• “Can it be you that I hear?”

• Rhetorical question

• Uncertainty

• Romanticism - no heightened powers of perception

Journey

• “Were we lead all that way for Birth or Death?”

• Rhetorical question

• Juxtaposition

• “Eliot views Christianity as a journey of gradual, difficult discovery rather than sudden glorious epiphany” - Powers

Voice P3 - isolation/hostility + criticism

Voice

• “You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness”

• Suggests a lack of vitality

• Hardy’s elegies “resist the tendency to provide comfort in situations of loss” - Riquelme

Journey

• “voices singing in our ears saying this was all folly” + “hard and bitter agony for us”

• Negative

• Connotes suffering and torture

Voices - conclusion

• explore the world around them and different perspectives

• Key concepts

Place - Poems

• Drummer Hodge + What the Thunder Said

• Darkling Thrush + Preludes

Place - Intro

1) lost in an unfamiliar landscape

2) Pessimism - modernity + brutality of nature

3) hope vs no hope

Places P1 - unfamiliar

Hodge

• “Strange-eyed constellations reigned his stars eternally”

• In control

• Foreign

• 2nd Boer war

Thunder

• “We’re who we’re now living are dying” + “Here is water but only rock”

• Juxtaposition

• Feels like going through a wasteland whilst reading the poem

• Grail quests

Place P2 - pessimism + criticism

Thrush

• “Frost was spectre grey” + “Seemed fervourless as I”

• Pathetic fallacy + Personification

• Tentative language

• Death imagery

Preludes

• “The burnt out ends of Smokey days”

• Olfactory imagery

• Likens life to a cigarette

• “The sordidness of the surroundings in the first section prepares for the increasing emphasis in the others on the sordidness of life itself” - Cahill

Places P3 - hope - criticism

Thrush

• “Of joy ilimited” + “Of such ecstatic sound”

• The Volta of the poem

• Optimistic language, hope in the darkness

• “The universe is neither malevolent or benevolent; it is simply indifferent” - Clipper

Preludes

• “Infinitely suffering thing”

• No hope

• “A sick version of life” - Chakraborty

Place - Conclusion

• places reflects the mood - intrinsically linked

• Suffering

• Brutality of nature and modernity