letters from yorkshire

Question 1

Themes

Answer 1

Longing, Reminiscing, Connections

Question 2

Tones

Answer 2

Melancholic, Rustic, Nostalgic

Question 3

Context

Answer 3

-Maura Dooley was born in Cornwall in 1957. She
spent three years of her life living in Yorkshire. She
now lives in London.
-The poem is autobiographical – it reflects her own life.
-The relationship between the man and woman is
unclear, and irrelevant: the important relationship
here is between the narrator and the rural lifestyle.

Question 4

Content, Meaning and Purpose

Answer 4

-The narrator speaks about a friend living in the
countryside who sends her letters about his rural life.
-She is now a writer living in the city and reminisces
about her former rural lifestyle.
-She wonders whether he has a more fulfilling life: “Is
your life more real because you dig and sow?”.
-Finally, it shows how connections to places and
people can be maintained with words.

Question 5

Language

Answer 5

-“digging his garden, planting his potatoes”: physical
verbs (also “breaking” and “clearing”) convey the
man’s active rural and outdoors lifestyle.
-“It’s not romance, simply how things are”: grounds
the poem in mundane reality, and a melancholic tone.
-“his knuckles singing”: conveys the energising effect
that rural work has on his hands, later contrasted with
the speaker’s soulless “feeding words onto a blank
screen”.
-“pouring air and light into an envelope”: tone shifts
to hopeful and magical tone, romanticising rural life.

Question 6

Form and Structure

Answer 6

-Free verse and use of 2nd person narrative (“your” and
“you”) creates the effect of a conversation or letter,
and a personal tone: the narrator is reaching out to the
man in the poem.
-First three stanzas emphasise the contrast between
their lives.
-Final two stanzas emphasise the connection between
their “souls”.
-Enjambment between “seasons” and “turning”
reflects that passing of time and seasons; emphasises
the seasons that she is missing by being in the city