Poetry
At this level, saying what a poem means is the beginning of the answer. The answer is about how the poem makes that meaning.
Five questions to ask of any poem
- Who is speaking, to whom, and in what situation? Never assume the speaker is the poet. The gap between speaker and poet is often the poem's entire method.
- What is the poem's argument? Most poems move: from a position to a modified position, from a question to an answer, from confidence to doubt. Find the movement and you have the essay.
- Where does it turn? A but, a yet, a question, a change of tense, a change of address, a shift in the length of the lines. Poems turn, and the turn is usually the point.
- What does the form do? A sonnet's fourteen lines, a stanza that breaks the pattern, a line left short — form is meaningful, and at A/L you are expected to say how.
- What is the syntax doing? Where do the sentences end? Do they match the lines or fight them? A sentence that runs across four lines behaves quite differently from four end-stopped lines.
Form as meaning, not as decoration
Weak A/L answers identify the form and stop: This is a sonnet with fourteen lines. True and worthless.
Strong answers say what the form does. A sonnet promises resolution within fourteen lines; a poem that fails to resolve inside them is making a point by failing. A regular stanza pattern broken once, late, draws the eye exactly where the poet wants it. A poem in couplets sounds settled, even complacent — which a poet may use ironically.
Ask always: what would be lost if this were written as prose? Whatever your answer is, that is what to write about.
Vocabulary you are expected to use accurately
- Speaker and persona
- The voice of the poem, which may be a constructed character distinct from the poet.
- Example: A dramatic monologue depends entirely on the reader seeing more than the speaker does.
- Volta
- The turn in a poem, especially in a sonnet, where the argument changes direction.
- Example: Locating the volta accurately is one of the quickest ways to show real reading.
- Enjambment and end-stopping
- Whether a sentence runs past the line ending or stops with it.
- Example: Sustained enjambment can create urgency or breathlessness; a sudden end-stop after it lands heavily.
- Caesura
- A strong pause within a line.
- Example: It can enact hesitation, interruption or a break in composure.
- Metre
- The underlying rhythmic pattern — iambic, trochaic, and so on.
- Example: You are not usually required to scan formally, but you are expected to notice where the metre is disturbed and to say what the disturbance does.
- Diction and register
- The kind of words chosen — plain or elaborate, formal or colloquial, abstract or concrete.
- Example: A shift in register mid-poem is always deliberate. Ask what it signals.
- Tone
- The speaker's attitude to the subject.
- Example: Be precise. Not "sad" but elegiac, or bitter, or resigned, or wry — and show which words establish it.
- Ambiguity
- A word or phrase that sustains more than one meaning at once.
- Example: At A/L, an ambiguity is not a problem to be resolved. Holding both meanings and showing why the poem wants both is precisely the skill being tested.
Building an argument about a poem
Do not write a guided tour: In the first stanza… In the second stanza… In the third stanza… A stanza-by-stanza walk is description, not argument, and it is the commonest weakness in A/L poetry answers.
Instead, decide what you want to argue about the poem, and organise the paragraphs by idea, drawing evidence from wherever in the poem it happens to be. A paragraph may quite properly use the second line and the last line together.
Your introduction should contain a sentence that could be disagreed with by an intelligent reader. If nobody could disagree with it, it is not an argument.