KMK(G)1
DANIELLE ROWLAND
HALL CROSS SCHOOL
36250
Compare and contrast ‘Death of a naturalist’ and ‘Catrin’
In both poems, the writers reflect on childhood and change. Heaney looks back on his childhood and the change he took while growing up where as Clarke is reflecting on childhood as an adult, a mother and how she copes, and her views of having a child, and being in child birth.
In Heaney’s poem, Death of a Naturalist, he is reflecting on his childhood and the attitude he uses towards his childhood. The attitude he has changes during the poem, at first, in the first stanza, he looks back fondly at his childhood
‘I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks to range on the window sills at home’ (line11)
‘But best of all there was the warm thick slobber’ (line 8)
This shows how much he likes nature and how much interest he has for it, how he even likes the ‘thick, warm slobber’. The style and voice of this stanza is happy and childlike. We can tell it is childlike by the way it is written, using long sentences and the repetition of the word ‘and’,
‘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’ (line 15)
But in the second stanza it changes, the tone of the stanza is less happy; it is serious and uses many negative phrases
‘Then one hot day when fields were rank’ (line 22)
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Peer Reviews
Here's what a star student thought of this essay
Quality of writing
The Quality of Written Communication (QWC) is below average. The candidate's clarity is fair, but their written expressions are often confusing and their intentions for analysis unclear ("sense of town" being a good example). Candidates must self-regulate checks for appropriate spelling, punctuation and above all grammar, because if the examiner fails to be able to understand what the candidates are trying to say they will not receive any QWC marks. Some spell-checkers and grammar-checkers on computers often miss simpler errors like misspelling a word so it spells another, and these need to be identified and rectified.
Level of analysis
The candidate's Level of Analysis is generally poor. The candidate makes some analysis of the language used but very rarely makes any active comparisons or discusses to a fair extent any other poetic device, such as structure or the use of unpleasant imagery. As the question directs candidates to "Compare and contrast" between Gillian Clarke's 'Catrin' and Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist', the candidate cannot earn higher than a high D grade for A Level. I would recommend the candidate becomes more familiar with the tools of poetic analysis, and how to effectively analyse language, imagery and structure in terms of the relevance to the poem. Commenting literally on what the poem shows does not win any marks, neither does "In Catrin there is a sense of town" - a "sense of town" is perhaps not the best phrasing, and nor is it particularly relevant as it is not something that can be compared to 'Death of a Naturalist'. Candidates must make sure that their analysis is to-the-point and relevant to the question proposed to them, because even illuminating analysis that lies adrift of what the mark scheme outlines will not earn marks.
Response to question
This candidate makes a good effort, but the essay is not very well written and the points are difficult to understand either through a bad articulation or simply a poor understanding of the poem and how to construct effective poetic analysis. The candidate makes a fair analysis of the tones and some poetic devices (metaphors, similes) but does not make any obvious comparison between the two poems because the discuss them separately rather than together. To counter this, I would recommend the candidate work on a different structure - rather than attempting to answer Poem-by-Poem, try Point-by-Point, as this would encourage more comparison more easily. This structure would see the candidate try something like analysis of the use of the theme of childhood - what do both poets say about it? How fondly do they look back at childhood? What are their thoughts about their memories? This could incorporate tone, imagery etc. The next point would be something like the structure - what do the stanza breaks tell us? Discussing in this fashion naturally encourages more comparative analysis as one poem can be analysed directly after the other by referring to the same analytical point.