Read More "An introduction: welcome to my blog."
Compare the presentation of love in the poems Do Not Go Gentle and Poem at 39.
My class wrote a timed response to this title today for IGCSE Eng Lit (Edexcel) practice. I attach mine below and also a sound file of the essay which could be used for discussion. I am not claiming it as …
Read More "Compare the presentation of love in the poems Do Not Go Gentle and Poem at 39."
Introducing analysis in Y9: Whitman. ‘Come up from the fields, father’.
Whilst fully aware of the move away from prescriptive PEE type structure in essays, I still use PEARL as my most familiar process for structure. I see this as embodying a 'what, why, how' approach and find it a good …
Read More "Introducing analysis in Y9: Whitman. ‘Come up from the fields, father’."
To know Curley’s wife 2019
I gave this lecture again today for a new group of y11 students. Sadly my trusty MP3 recorder has died, so I post last year's sound file again for them to use. Feel free to dig in. The lecture is …
Heaney and the Famine: At a potato Digging and For the Commander of the Eliza
Continuing my preparation for teaching Death of a Naturalist, these two poems sit at the centre of the collection and lie at the heart of any discussion of Heritage and of the meaning of Irishness explored in the poems. We …
Read More "Heaney and the Famine: At a potato Digging and For the Commander of the Eliza"
Huckleberry Finn meets Bruce Springsteen
Whither Huck? He’s alive and well in Western Stars… It must be the summer. This post looks at the links between Huckleberry Finn and the many first person narrators in Bruce Springsteen’s new album: Western Stars. It is intended seriously, …
Follower, Heaney: thoughts on metre and language
Follower -note the lack of an article suggesting the whole range of potential meanings and sub-meanings to the word. Heaney is writing literally of a boy who followed his father around the fields and farm in his youth and who …
Read More "Follower, Heaney: thoughts on metre and language"
Death of a Naturalist: a study in innocence.
In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem of the collection, Heaney explores ideas which will be key to these poems – the conflict inherent between innocence and experience and the sense of terror which drives a young man towards …
