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How To Read Poetry In Gcse English Literature

This article looks at how to read a poem for the first time and offers three tips for better understanding it.

Date : 01/09/2020

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Thomas

Uploaded by : Thomas
Uploaded on : 01/09/2020
Subject : English

Love it or hate it (and plenty of students hate it), poetry will always be a part of GCSE English Literature. Why? Because poetry is probably the oldest written art form in the world and continues to be an important literary form. To put it into perspective, poetry existed for thousands of years before the novel came about. Of course, that doesn t make poetry any easier to understand.GCSE students often struggle with poetry because poems can be so difficult to decipher. I advise students to read a poem two or three times to begin with. After each time, ask yourself: What is the poem about? If your interpretation changes after each reading, try to find out why. What is changing your impression of the poem? What are you seeing that you didn t see the first time you read it?

Next, you can start to read it more thoroughly by looking at the following three aspects of the poem:


1) Context

Context means the historical background to the poem. Ask the following questions: Who wrote it? Where are they from? When did they live? When was the poem written?

Let s use Wilfred Owen s Exposure as an example.

Wilfred Owen was a British poet and solider of WWI who died in 1918 at the age of 25. The poem is set during the winter of 1917, which was said to have been one of the worst in living memory. Owen and his fellow soldiers were forced to lie outside in freezing conditions for several days. Owen wrote Exposure in 1918 after roughly 3 years of military service, during which he was hospitalised for shell shock , now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Owen died in battle just days before the end of the war.


2) Themes

A theme is a central idea(s) which runs through a poem. If you re not sure how to identify the themes of a poem, ask yourself What is the poem about? In the case of Exposure, the answer would be Wilfred Owen s experiences of WWI, the harsh winter, death, loss of hope, etc.

So, the themes of Exposure are war, weather, suffering, death and despair (the opposite of hope).


3) Interpretation

Poems are complex art forms and as such are open to interpretation. Examiners want to see that you are engaging with the poems and forming opinions about them. At the same time, they want to see that you have evidence for your opinions you can t just make up any interpretation! lt;/p>

After reading the poem a few times and looking at the context and themes, ask yourself: What is this poem about? What is the poet trying to say? Make some notes on this. For example, your interpretation of Exposure might be that the poem is about the suffering and hopelessness of war.

Pick out two or three lines to support your interpretation.For example, the first line creates a strong sense of suffering: Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us And this line creates a strong sense of despair: The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow tells us that, for the soldiers, even the start of a new day brings on misery. Now that you have an idea of the poem s context and themes and have begun to develop your own interpretation of what the poem is about, you can go on to the next step: Analysis.

This resource was uploaded by: Thomas