AS Level Poetry

1. ‘You Cannot Do This’
Gwendolyn McEwen

2. GET FLIRTY!!!
F 1. Focus on the form of the poem , looking at the structure, punctuation,
line lengths and the arrangement of the poem’s stanzas. How do these
features add interest and meaning to the poem? Also examine the
arrangements of the words, phrases and sentences in the poem.
2. Examine the language used in the poem, looking at the meaning of
L words and whether they have negative or positive connotations.
3. Look at the techniques, imagery and poetic language that has been
I used? How do these techniques bring out the main themes and ideas in
the poem?
4. How does the poet make use of rhyme, repetition and rhythm? Why
R does he do this?
5. What are the poet’s main ideas that he brings out in the poem and how
does he do this? Explain the feelings that the poet conveys throughout
T the poem. Describe the poet’s attitude to his subject. Does this change
as the poem progresses? Carefully examine the tone throughout the
poem and find vocabulary to back up your discussion.
Y 6. How do you react to this poem? Does it bring any particular thoughts to
mind? Which poems would you compare this one with?

3. Author
• Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 to a mother who spent much of her life in and
out of mental health institutions and a father who died young from alcoholism. She dropped out of
high school – to study on her own terms – and eventually taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Greek.
(It’s worth noting, if only to appreciate the symmetry, that she later wound up with corresponding
lovers for each language.)
• As a young woman in the early sixties, she earned a reputation as a precocious regular at Toronto’s
legendary Bohemian Café, where she wowed Margaret Atwood and other early CanLit luminaries
with her powerful readings – and where she also met Milton Acorn. Their brief marriage, lived out
mainly in a rough little cottage on Ward’s Island in Toronto Harbour, was seen by many as a “beauty
and the beast” match. MacEwen visited Israel and Egypt in a time when a woman journeying alone
in the Middle East was rare and when neither country was particularly tourist friendly. Throughout
her life, she moved from apartment to apartment, travelled the city by bicycle, and survived on little
money. Like her father before her, she struggled with alcoholism, an addiction that led to her
premature death at forty-six.
• Her first poem was published in The Canadian Forum when she was only 17, and she left school at
l8 to pursue a writing career. With her first husband, MacEwan operated a coffee house in Toronto,
The Trojan Horse, in the early 1970s.
• During her lifetime, MacEwen published fifteen collections of poetry, as well as several works of
fiction and drama. She won the Governor General's Award at the age of twenty-seven for her poetry
collection The Shadow Maker.
• MacEwen served as Writer in Residence at both the University of Western Ontario and the
University of Toronto. Gwendolyn MacEwen died in 1987, at the age of 46.
• She died in November of 1987.

4. • Judith Fitzgerald (identified in her bio as a close friend of the poet’s in her
final decade) introduces MacEwen’s literary accomplishments as follows:
“Unimaginably wounded by grief (dolor), passion (furor), and hardship
(labor), heart-broken beyond belief, inexplicably abandoned by those who
called her friend, MacEwen still somehow managed to stay the writerly
course… always mindful of her place in the holy acts of destruction and
creation…” Indeed, we are told, she “sears” pages, “miraculously reshapes
them after the fashion of the phoenix,” and remains true to “the long
charred night of the ashen soul.”
• She performed her poetry (by heart) wearing long, velvety dresses, her
eyes outlined in black kohl. As a youth, she avidly studied the Hebrew and
Gnostic mystics, and incorporated ideas from these belief systems into her
writing. She had a thing for mysterious beings such as magicians and
escape artists, who turn up frequently in her poems, as do prophetic
children, “cosmic” objects, alchemy, princes, gods and kings.

5. FIRST READING
SIFT through the poem after your first reading:
• Inform us of the intention of the poet and his main
ideas overall;
• Focus on the form (structure/punctuation) and the
feelings conveyed (poet’s attitude/tone used) and how
this highlights the main ideas;
• Specify the subject matter and sense of the poem
through a brief summary;
• Tell us about the techniques, imagery and poetic
language that show the ways themes and ideas are
presented.

6. Stanza 1
• The narrator’s opening voice is brash and
confrontational. Her command that ‘you cannot do
this’ brings a sudden challenge, made as if direct to the
reader with the use of the second person, and the
suddenness emphasised by the lack of an opening
capital letter, suggesting that we enter the poem in the
middle of an argument.
• The opening is also disconcerting because we do not
know who is actually being addressed, nor what they
are guilty of doing to the narrator’s people. To ‘hack
away a horizon’ is unlikely to be taken literally and a
number of metaphoric interpretations are possible.

7. Stanza 2
• The central stanza seeks to assure that events
will be recorded; the poem itself ‘is not art’
but a ‘record’ of the threat, or atrocity, and its
effects.

8. Stanza 3
• The third stanza, with its repetition of
‘something to do with’, extends the refusal to
be explicit, encompassing small tangibles,
such as ‘signet rings’ to large intangibles, such
as ‘power’. In between, most aspects of
human hope, aspiration and culture are
included, which suggests that humanity itself
is under threat.

9. Questions
• ‘you cannot do this’. Discuss what the narrator
may be referring to.
• What is the effect of MacEwen’s avoidance of
capital letters at the beginning of sentences?
• Identify the narrator’s tone and mood and
explain your answer with evidence from the text.
• What are the connotations of the word ‘hack’?
• Identify two examples of repetition in the poem
and explain the effect.

10. Questions Contd.
• The personal pronoun ‘I’ is the only capitalised
word in the text. What might be the reason
for this?
• ‘it has something to do with horses and signet
rings and school trophies’. What associations
can be derived from these images?

11. • Compare with
• Cambodia James Fenton
• Attack Siegfried Sassoon
• Anthem For Doomed Youth Wilfred Owen
• My Dreams Are of a Field Afar A. E. Housman