Bernardo Veiga
Class 9B
Several of the poems you have read deal with strong emotions. Compare three of these poems, explaining what emotions are conveyed and how the poets achieve this.
The three poems ‘On My First Sonne’, ‘Mid-Term Break’ and ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ all explore the same theme, which are the emotions of love and loss. This conveys a sense of radical grief to the reader.
The poem ‘Mid-Term Brake’ discusses the delicate issue of a child’s death. The poet Seamus Heaney uses many different linguistic devices in the poem to express all the emotion possible to make those who are reading the poem understand what it feels like loosing a small brother. In the very start of the poem a sense of sorrow is conveyed and some conclusions can be taken. For instance the boy that is in the boarding school is feeling lonely. The mood of the poem can definitely be found in the second line “Counting bells knelling classes to a close”. This shows us how unhappy the boy is in the boarding school and it shows us what direction the play is taking, which is a gloomy one. Heaney uses as linguistic devices alliteration and assonance throughout the poem to emphasize the sound of the bells in the funeral and to make the feeling of time passing. We can see this in line one when he says it’s “morning” and in line three he says it’s “two o’ clock”. Seamus Heaney in the third line of the second stanza, emphasizes the emotional feelings of a man by saying “Big Jim Evans” followed in the line “…saying it was a hard blow”.
This is a preview of the whole essay
Peer Reviews
Here's what a star student thought of this essay
Quality of writing
The Quality of Written Communication is average. There are a few syntactical errors, leading to clumsily phrased sentences that feature too many conjunctions and should therefore be split into separate sentences, and there are typing errors occasionally dotted about, which should be seen to before submission with a proof-read and spell-check.
Level of analysis
The candidate shows an ability to understand the emotions of the poems, but very rarely delves deeper than face value when it comes to understanding why the poems are so emotive, and to what lengths the poets go to in order to achieve that effect. Candidate must be appropriately armed with an array of evaluative points that they can make with regard to each poem, showing that they have the ability to comment on structure, imagery, language and connotations of the poems. This candidate hasn't done such, but they have shown an attempt to. Where they infrequently try to explain the effect of a certain phrase, their quotation skills are clunky and messy, and often quote whole lines of stanzas rather than honing in on the finer details of why a certain word was chosen over another. Paying the attention to detail in terms of precise quotations of specific words is imperative for any candidate hoping to achieve a high grade. For example, this essay quotes "Counting bells knelling classes to a close" from 'Mid-Term Break', and not only there explanation poor and undeveloped, they should quote only "bell knelling", or simply "knelling" commenting on the word "knelling" which is used as an indicator of a funeral or recent death. There are sinister connotation of a knelling bell in a church steeple, creating a sense of discomfort and unsettlement in the readers.
Response to question
This question asks candidate to compare other Post-1914 poetry with Seamus Heaney's 'Mid-Term Break'. The candidate has chosen wisely 'On My First Sonne' by Ben Jonson and 'Refugee Mother and Child' by China Achebe, though very few analytical points are made and full explored. It feels as though the candidate has taken the poems' emotions at face value and not considered how the poets achieve these emotions, although there is a little evidence of contextual appreciation in their analysis on 'Mid-Term Break'. The focus overall is somewhat obscured.
