Poetry Anthology - Place and Nature Flashcards
Death of a Naturalist Context and Form
By Seamus Heaney
Written by Seamus Heaney, a Northern Irish born poet from Londonderry.
Connects the landscape and the rural with personal memories and Irish history.
Post-Romantic response to nature and the natural world as it becomes a part of cultural life.
Religious idea: Post-Lapsarian world fallen into sin contrasted with innocence of youth.
Reaction to industrialised, authorised approaches to learning.
Iambic pentameter. Childhood imagery and vocabulary used to convey youth and innocence. Two halves, one referring to youth and naivety, the other referring to experience and knowledge.
The Prelude Context and Form
By William Wordsworth
Written by William Wordsworth and is an autobiographical poem.
Part of the Romantic movement.
Romantics connected winter with a counter-enlightenment response, being a place of instinct, emotion and memory.
Romanticism: the sublime (excess, inarticulate emotion in response to awe of nature).
A prelude is usually an indroduction to a piece of writing or music. He wrote the poem as an introduction but never finished the larger piece.
Poem begins with the beginning of the end of day and the warm light of the setting sun reflecting in the cottage windows. Poem ends with the end of the day as the sun sets and the stars appear.
To Autumn Context and Form
By John Keats
Written by John Keats, who had an awareness of death - nursing his brother who dies of tuberculosis; lost his own parents; sense of his own mortality and illness (died aged 26).
Poem is an ode. Last of Keats’ six great odes, all written in 1819. In the other odes Keats uses ten lines in each stanza, but uses one extra here, relating to excess of everything.
Living Space Context and Form
By Imtiaz Dharker
Written by Imtiaz Dharker, a Scottish Pakistani Muslim Calvanist who likes to explore geographical and cultural displacement, communal conflict, gender and identity.
The poem is about the Dharavi slums in Mumbai, India.
Written in one long thin stanza with 22 short lines. Three unequal stanzas to mirror the meaning of the poem.
London Context and Form
By William Blake
Written by William Blake as he rejects established religion and the way children had to work. He suggests that the British should also undertake a French revolution.
Appealing to the rich, as only those who had money would be able to afford an education and be able to read.
Strict ABAB rhyme scheme in four stanzas, quatrain.
Hawk Roosting Context and Form
By Ted Hughes
Written by Ted Hughes, who was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the countryside. He served in the RAF for two years, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University and studied Archaelogy and Anthropology.
It can be read in a few ways: praising the bird; describing the bird; metaphor for the mind of a potential human killer; metaphor for the power of nature; or exploring dictatorship.
The poem has a strong, regular form with six stanzas of four lines each. Shorter lines express strong ideas.
Death of a Naturalist Key Quotations
By Seamus Heaney
- ‘All year the flax-dam festered.’
- ‘The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance.’
- ‘But best of all was the warm thick slobber of frogspawn.’
- ‘Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.’
- ‘Miss Walls would tell us how the daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn.’
The Prelude Key Quotations
By William Wordsworth
- ‘It was a time of rapture’
- ‘We hiss’d along the polish’d ice.’
- ‘Every icy crag tinkled like iron.’
- ‘The precipices rang aloud.’
- ‘The orange sky of evening died away.’
- ‘An alien sound of melancholy.’
To Autumn Key Quotations
By John Keats
- ‘Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.’
- ‘Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.’
- ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’
- ‘For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.’
- ‘Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.’
Living Space Key Quotations
By Imtiaz Dharker
- ‘Not enough straight lines.’
- ‘Nails clutch at open seams.’
- ‘Towards the miraculous.’
- ‘Eggs in a wire basket.’
- ‘Bright, thin walls of faith.’
Hawk Roosting Key Quotations
By Ted Hughes
- ‘I sit at the top of the wood.’
- ‘Now I hold Creation in my foot.’
- ‘I kill where I please because it is all mine.’
- ‘The allotment of death.’
- ‘I am going to keep things like this.’
London Key Quotations
By William Blake
- ‘I wandered through each chartered street.’
- ‘Chartered Thames does flow.’
- ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
- ‘Mind forg’d manacles.’
- ‘Blackening church.’
- ‘Plagues the marriage hearse.’
