Hello everybody, before we get into the video, just a quick reminder that I have short animated
analysis videos on every video in the Power and Conflict cluster – I’ve linked the
playlist in the description.
OK, let’s imagine your name poem is ‘Poppies’, and this is the question:
Compare how poets present conflict in Weir’s ‘Poppies’ and one other poem.
So the first thing to do is re-read or scan through the named poem, pen in hand, and to
annotate anything you can think of that might be relevant to this question.
So for ‘Poppies’ I might pick out the dramatic monologue form - the speaker is addressing
the son: ‘Before you left’, but we never hear from the son, which highlights the fact
that he is not there, and that imbalance represents the speaker’s suffering.
The quotation from the power and conflict poetry rap is ‘Sellotape bandaged around
my hand’, and that’s an example of the blending of military and domestic language
– something we see throughout the poem.
By combining an everyday domestic item – Sellotape, with a word we might associate with war: ‘bandaged’,
it symbolises how the speaker’s suffering has taken over their daily life.
The poem also has an intriguing cyclical structure – the first and last stanza are six lines
long, and this cyclical structure perhaps represents the fact that the speaker’s suffering
is inescapable.
So that re-reading of the named poem will give me my concept:
In ‘Poppies’, Weir presents conflict as something that causes great suffering beyond
the confines of the warzone.
Now with THAT in mind, I will then flick back to the list of poems and browse through each
title one by one, considering which poem to compare with that line of argument.
And let me just point out.
It’s not that I will now think ‘OK is there another poem that uses a cyclical structure,
or imagery, or the dramatic monologue form’ No, what I want to do is think about my second
poem in terms of the idea – that conflict causes suffering.
The June 2019 exam report pointed out that: ‘students who led their analysis through
ideas in the poem, rather than methods, tended to do much better.’
So that’s why I want to follow this approach.
So, I’ll flick back and look at the list of poem titles in the exam paper and go through
each one making my decision on which compares best.
And it seems to me that there are a couple of strong potential choices here: ‘Remains’
and ‘War Photographer’ – both of which also explore the effects of conflict outside
of a war zone.
I actually think there are strong arguments for both, but in this video I’ll go with
‘War Photographer’ and how the effect of conflict is that people outside of a war
zone so quickly forget about it, and fail to engage with it.
And obviously I don’t have that second poem with me, so I’m going to need to remember
my points.
I might include: Duffy’s use of caesura, where ‘Rural England’
is placed between two full stops, separating it completely from the descriptions of the
war zones, reflecting how the people in the poem are able to separate themselves from
the reality of war.
This is also represented through the half rhyme in the line ‘with tears between the
bath and pre-lunch beers’.
there's the half rhyme, the mid-line rhyme of ‘tears’ and
‘beers’.
And that actually quickens the pace in the final stanza.
It represents the speed at which people forget the atrocities
of war they are looking at in the newspapers.
And with those things in mind I come up with my thesis statement for the answer:
Both ‘Poppies’ and ‘War Photographer’ explore the impact of conflict, but whilst
‘Poppies’ focuses on the personal impact, ‘War Photographer’ explores its effects
on a national scale.
Now of course, I’m not saying this is how you would HAVE to do it if a question came
up about Poppies and conflict.
All I’m trying to do is show you the sort of process you might go through for that first
five minutes.
If you have a different idea, put it in the
comments section,.