This is a two hour les

1. Tuesday 21st February 2012
Learning Objective:
To be able to explain how language and
structure contribute to writers’
presentation of ideas, themes and settings.
Must: C Should: B Could: A
Starter: Read the sheet about the poet. Highlight any information that you
think is important.
What does she mean by

3. Analysis of the poem
Task 1:
Each be given a different sheet
Read and summarise the information
You must be able to discuss this information
with someone new to inform their analysis
about:
Background
Themes
Poetic form

4. Group 1: Background
• Group 2: Themes
Group 3: Poetic Form

6. A ghazal is an ancient form of poetry which originated
in the Middle East, particularly Persia (modern Iran).
Ghazals must be at least five stanzas long, with each
stanza being made of a pair of lines, or couplet. The
second line of each couplet traditionally has a refrain, a
pattern of rhyme or similar words.
Traditionally, ghazals are about unfulfilled love – the
narrative voice loves someone else, but they either
cannot or do not want to return the love.
What themes are evident in the
poem/become clearer now you
have this piece of information?

7. Key Themes
theme of love and separation suggestion of forbidden or impossible love
written in praise of the beloved theme of unrequited love
beloved’s power to enchant represented beloved portrayed as beyond reach or
in extended metaphors unattainable
explores sexual desire of lover spiritual elements within the relationship
lover is presented as powerless to
love expressed in erotic terms
resist her feelings

8. • Return to the poem, and using different colours or annotations, find each of the
following. Be prepared to share your ideas in class. You have just one minute for each!
• 1. Identify what you think is the most seductive line (where the speaker is trying
to persuade the beloved to return her affections).
• 2. Select the most effective metaphor or extended metaphor to describe love in
the poem.
• (A metaphor is a way of describing something by saying it is something else, eg ‘the
sun is a furnace’. An extended metaphor is a metaphor that continues into the
sentences that follow.)
• 3. Choose the stanza or sher you think best expresses the speaker’s love and
feelings.
• 4. Which is the most sexually euphemistic line?
(Euphemisms are indirect or suggestive ways to describe explicit or taboo topics, such as
sex.)
• 5. Which do you think is either the most romantic, or the most sentimental or
clichéd line? (Clichés are phrases that have a predictable and unoriginal quality
because they are overused, eg ‘you mean the world to me…’.)
• 6. Find an example of idiomatic language.
(Idioms are phrases with a figurative meaning, eg ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’.)

9. Soldiers Wounded Soldier
What are your impressions of both images?

10. What is post-
traumatic
stress?

11. Draw the images to go
with the quotations

12. Armitage wrote the
poem about this man:
Eddie
A born soldier, Eddie expected to shoot and be shot at: that’s what he was
trained for. Instead, he lifted the barrier at the checkpoint to wave
through the death squads.
A couple of days later, he’d be a member of the party that went in to
witness the horror and clean up the mess. There are things he won’t
describe, he says, because they are so horrific. To try to cure his
nerves and overcome his paranoid reaction to loud bangs, he once took a
revolver out into a field and fired round after round of blanks against
his head.
… But, for me, the last word comes not from a man but from Laura, Eddie’s
wife. Tracing the scar of a bullet that took away part of her husband’s
face, then continued pin-balling through his body, grazing his heart
along the way, she describes the slow and sometimes painful process of
trying to reach him, touch him, love him and make him human again.

13. The Manhunt
After the first phase,
after passionate nights and intimate days,
only then would he let me trace
the frozen river which ran through his face,
only then would he let me explore
http://anthology.a
the blown hinge of his lower jaw,
and handle and hold
the damaged, porcelain collar-bone,
qa.org.uk/attachm
and mind and attend
the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade,
ents/290.html
and finger and thumb
the parachute silk of his punctured lung.
Only then could I bind the struts
and climb the rungs of his broken ribs,
and feel the hurt
of his grazed heart.
Skirting along,
only then could I picture the scan,
the foetus of metal beneath his chest
where the bullet had finally come to rest.
Then I widened the search,
traced the scarring back to its source
to a sweating, unexploded mine
buried deep in his mind, around which
every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.
Then, and only then, did I come close.

14. Chatter Box
Chatterbox
 THINK
 What is your overall impression of the poem?
 Do you feel sympathy for the narrator? Why or why not?
 Do you feel sympathy for the wounded soldier? Why or why not?
 Do you think Armitage has managed to write effectively about the
situation? What does or does not work for you?
 The Anthology has a section on ‘Conflict’ poetry; why isn’t this poem
included in there, instead of in the ‘Relationships’ section?

15. To be able to explain how language and structure contribute to
writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.