Guides for A Level English

Hello  students of A Level English Literature!  You will be pleased to learn, if you did not know already, that there is help at hand.   The following two guides are available for you.  If in doubt, ask Ms Axford.

Victorian Verse: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forward-Poems-Decade-Edexcel-Literature/dp/1540871797/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF

Poems of the Decade:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forward-Poems-Decade-Edexcel-Literature/dp/1540871797/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Interview on female infanticide - The Deliverer

For background on this, in Pakistan but also relevant to India, listen to:

Women's Hour 5th April 2017

Victorian Verse - Buy the Book!

Dear students,

You loved it - I listened!   You can now buy a compilation of these blogs on Victorian Verse from Amazon, on Kindle or in paperback.   There is extra material in it as I have updated and expanded it.
Here is the link.

Please contribute generously to my pension fund :)

The Victorian Way of Death

Death, and the fear of death, was an ever-present concern of Victorian writers.  Whilst quoting average life-expectancy figures needs to be treated with caution, (as it is skewed by high rates of infant mortality and the death of women in childbirth), the average life-expectancy of a baby born in a large town early in the century was around 35 years.  By the middle of the century, it had dropped to between 25 – 30 years.   One in five children born during the 1830s – 40s died before their 5^th birthday.  Particularly for the urban poor, poverty and malnutrition, coupled with diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis, in over-crowded, unsanitary conditions, and high levels of violent crime, meant that death was ever-present.  However, if you were lucky enough to survive beyond 40 years, then you might look to live almost as long as people today. 

Funerals were big business in mid-Victorian Britain.  In “Oliver Twist”, Dickens gives us a picture of the fetishising of death that grew up during the period. Oliver obtains a post as a “Mute” – a person who stands silently by the coffin and accompanies it to the churchyard.  He is a part of the elaborate funeral rites that even Victorians of modest means arranged, together with the black-plumed horses and glass coffins.  There was an industry, not just of funeral directors, but of the accompanying “accessories”: black mourning clothes; mourning jewellery, often made of jet from Whitby in Yorkshire; black-edged stationery; garlands and black ribbons for decorating houses and churches.  With the growth in population and move to cities, the old, local churchyards were soon over-flowing. To relieve the pressure for burial space in London, the Victorians opened a ring of cemeteries outside the city – Highgate, Kensal Green, Brompton, Abney Park, West Norwood, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets were all built between 1832 and 1841.  This was the era of the monumental mason – the men who carved the angels, urns, books and cherubs to stand at the head of gravestones, much of which reflected the architecture of the Gothic revival. 

No surprise, then, that Death and the trappings of death infuse the writings of novelists and poets of the period.  This preoccupation stems not just from a melancholy streak in the writers, but from their everyday experience.  Many were directly touched by the deaths of loved ones close to them.  Dickens had a sister who died aged five, his beloved sister-in-law died at the age of seventeen.  Many of Dickens’ characters die young – Little Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop”, Smyke in “Nicholas Nickleby”, Joe in “Bleak House”.  The poets in the selection were similarly touched by death.  Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam died at the age of 22; the Brontes lost their mother and aunt when they were young and their brother in his 20s, they all died before the age of 40; two of EBB’s brothers died when she was in her twenties and she was in ill-health most of her life; Christina Rossetti also suffered an undiagnosed malady and lived in constant fear of early death, although she survived to 64. The Brontes’ novels are full of dying people: Jane Eyre is an orphan, her friend Helen Burns dies at Lowood House; Francis and Catherine Earnshaw die under the age of 20 as does Linton Heathcliff.  The poetry in the selection has Death as a recurring theme – “In Memoriam – AHH”, Maud’s brother is killed violently, “Died.. ” is about a death notice, “My Last Duchess” has a dead woman at its heart, “The Nurse” is visiting a dead or dying man, “Remember” is written from the point of view of a woman contemplating her own death, in “Echo”, there are images of death, “Drummer Hodge” and “A Wife in London” are about men killed in War.  

For the Victorians, the words of the Burial Service, "In the midst of life we are in death", were very real.

A Note on Themes - Liminal Spaces

The question in the A level examinations will be on a “theme” – a central concern or idea which may form the focus of the poem or be an integral part of its meaning.  You will be asked to explore the presentation of this “theme” in one named poem and one other poem of your choice. 

These “themes” could include, but not be limited to:  an emotion – such as love, loss, sorrow, joy; the evocation of “place”, as the subject of the poem or as the setting for the poem; the treatment of abstract concepts such as Time, or Death, or Religion; a “happening” such as War, Childhood, Marriage; the relationships between men and women.  The range is very broad.  Where a poem lends itself to suggesting a particular theme, this has been noted in the explication.  However, these suggestions are not exhaustive; one of the skills to be mastered is to know the texts well enough to be able to link them to themes which may not be immediately obvious. 

In addition to this, there is one “theme” which seems to run through most of the selection, so it has been explored and illustrated below. 

Liminal Spaces

Liminal means “threshold”, the part of a door that you step across to move from one space to another.  Liminality is the space between different states – between night and day (dawn), between day and night (twilight), between life and death, between out and in.

Most of the poems in the selection are similarly concerned with situations where the poet/persona, or the setting, or the subject matter, or more than one of these, are “in between” states or spaces.  

Tennyson

In “In Memoriam – VII”, Tennyson seems unable to move on from the living presence of Hallam on the street he revisits; “XCV” is set between night and day – a night when he seems to move from sorrow to reconciliation; the “Maud” poems are full of liminal images – “I.xi” is set between the “solid ground” and “sweet heavens”; “I.xviii” is set at the point where Maud is both “his” and “not his” – he is on the verge of a consummation of their love, but it is never realised;  Maud does not “Come into the Garden” – we leave the narrator still waiting; II.iv ”O that ‘twere possible” imagines Maud as a ghost, caught between life and death and the narrator as a confused “wasted frame”.

Emily & Charlotte Bronte – The Visionary

The setting is inside, but the focus is on the visitor coming through the winter weather to visit her.  She is in a “limbo”, where the Visionary is anticipated (as in “Come into the garden, Maud”) but not yet realised.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Grief” explores the emotion of the title, with a central image of a statue, lifelike, but dead and unable to “move on”; The subject of “Died...” is both alive and dead at the same time; they are talking about him as if alive, even as his obituary notice travels to them from London.

Robert Browning

The Duke in “My Last Duchess” is, literally, “between” Duchesses; In “Home Thoughts…”, the poet is in Italy but casting his thoughts toward England, and is thus caught between the two; the focus of “Meeting at Night” is in the space between “not with the beloved” and “with the beloved”; In “Love in a Life” the focus is on the emptiness between the beloved being “not found” and “found” and remains unresolved.

Charlotte Bronte

All of the poems in the selection by Charlotte Bronte are set in liminal space.  “The Autumn day” is set at Twilight: “The house was still…” is also set at twilight, and the birds’ songs occupy the space between indoors (the canary) and outdoors (the free bird); “I now had only to retrace” recounts the point at which the poet turns back from her outward walk to head for home; “The Nurse believed…” has a question at its heart – is the man alive or dead?; ”Stanzas” opens with a statement that puts the poet in a space between the world of the imagination and the real world.

Christina Rossetti

“Remember” explores memory – the place where the dead still exist for the living; an “Echo” exists in the space between the first sound and the return (as in the songs between the birds in “The house was still”); “May” captures the very moment when she “passes” from a feeling of hope and joy to one of desolation, as Tennyson does in reverse in XCV; “Somewhere or other” by its title suggests that the poet is caught between anticipation and consummation with only a “hedge between”.

Thomas Hardy

In “At the Inn”, the poet describes the two “As we seemed we were not” – they existed both as lovers, to the innkeeper, but were not; lovers and yet not lovers (like the alive/dead man in “Died…” or in “The Nurse…”); In “I Look into My Glass”, a mirror is a space between the reality and the reflection in the mirror, where Hardy seems to exist as both young, on the inside, and old, on the outside; even “Drummer Hodge” seems to lie between England, where he was born, and Africa, where his body is, as if a bit of England has been transported out there; “A wife in London” captures the time between receiving notice of her husband’s death and a letter written in the dead man’s hand – again, there was a moment where he was both alive AND dead; “The Darkling Thrush” is set at the turn of the year and the turn of the century – New Year’s Eve, 1899.  A liminal space indeed.

Victorian Verse - The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy

Browning's “first, fine, careless rapture" is heard agin here, but with a very different effect.  The title alone suggests a more sombre note – the thrush is “Darkling” as it is singing as it grows dark, the dark being a metaphor for the end of the year, the end of the century (it was written in 1900) and the end of the certainties of the Victorian era.  “Darkling” also is a word much used by poets – most notably Keats (in another poem written to a bird – “Ode to a Nightingale” -  in which he describes his mood as “Darkling”) and, closer to Hardy in time, Matthew Arnold.  In his famous poem, “On Dover Beach” (publ. 1867), which is also in the anthology, Arnold writes:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold’s answer to this bleak vision of mankind is to be “true to one another”.

An atheist from an early age, Hardy was nevertheless spiritual in his search for meaning in life, his desire to understand the forces working for good and evil among mankind, and his belief in the power of redemption through love and fellow feeling.  “The Darkling Thrush” seems also to find Hardy at his lowest ebb, writing at the end of the 19^th century, whilst the Boer War dragged on, and contemplating a doubtful future.  Hardy had a deep, spiritual connection to the English landscape; in his novels, like “Return of the Native” or “Tess”, the Wessex countryside is as important as the characters.  For Hardy to personify the landscape as a dead corpse is testimony to the depth of Hardy’s despair.

The poem is in alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimetre lines, or ballad metre, with the expected regular ababcdcd rhyme scheme.   This may seem an odd choice for a poem which is non-narrative and lyrical.  However, it is the contrast between the potentially jaunty rhythm and rhyme and the darkness of the subject matter, as well as the manipulation of the syntax to emphasise particular words, that make the poem so effective.

I leant upon a coppice gate 

                When Frost was spectre-grey, 

And Winter's dregs made desolate 

                The weakening eye of day. 

The poet is out at twilight in winter and stops on his walk to rest, leaning on a gate which leads to a small wood (“coppice”).  The first stanza depicts the frozen, empty landscape which is quickly imbued with a feeling of dread.  The “Frost”, personified by the capitalisation to suggest its pervasive power, as is “Winter”, is like a ghost (“spectre-grey”); “dregs” means what is left over and has no goodness; the sun is pale and warmth less (“weakening eye”) and also “desolate”, like a blind sightless thing. 

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 

                Like strings of broken lyres, 

And all mankind that haunted nigh 

                Had sought their household fires. 

Not only is this landscape cheerless, but the imagery in the next four lines suggests that the world itself is “out of tune”.  “tangled bine stems” are the curling tendrils of a plant – possibly woodbine or honeysuckle, a climbing plant which entangles itself in low bushes and trees – which can be seen against the leafless branches.  The lyre is a stringed instrument from classical Greece (from which the word “lyric” comes) which lifts this very English scene into the realm of the time less and universal.  The word “scored”, here meaning to make deep cuts, another bleak image, may also be a punning reference to music.  This universality is reinforced by the use of “mankind”, rather than “men”.  The use of “haunted” rather than “lived” again suggests that, as Hamlet says, “the time is out of joint”, at odds with itself.

The land's sharp features seemed to be 

                The Century's corpse outleant, 

His crypt the cloudy canopy, 

                The wind his death-lament. 

The ancient pulse of germ and birth 

                Was shrunken hard and dry, 

And every spirit upon earth 

                Seemed fervourless as I. 

The imagery of death and decay continues, transforming the English landscape into the stuff of nightmares.  He sees the land before him as the embodiment of the 19^th century, which has just “died”.  “Outleant” appears to be a neologism by Hardy, presumably meaning “lent out”, as if the dying century has inhabited the landscape and died there, its “features” thin and wasted to show the “sharp” bones beneath.  The tomb of the Century is the leaden grey, cloud-covered sky and the shrieking of the winter wind the wailing of mourners.  The alliterated “crypt/cloudy/canopy” suggests the hard edges of a stone tomb.  The life-force of the land - “germ” means “seed” – is shrivelled up.  Mankind wanders this barren landscape as a homeless spirit, aimless and energy-less – as Hardy does.  Overall, it is vision of decay and hopelessness, of which he is the epicentre.

At once a voice arose among 

                The bleak twigs overhead 

In a full-hearted evensong 

                Of joy illimited; 

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, 

                In blast-beruffled plume, 

Had chosen thus to fling his soul 

                Upon the growing gloom. 

Suddenly, the silence is broken by a “voice”.  Whose is not yet known, as if Hardy is searching for the source in the “bleak twigs overhead”.  The “l” sound in “bleak” is the first in a series of alliterated “l” sounds that continue throughout the stanza. The transformation that this “voice” brings, however, is immediately apparent – it is “full-hearted”, in contrast to the lifeless corpses wandering around, and it sings an “evensong”, here meaning a “song sung in the evening”, but also the religious service held daily in church, suggestive of people coming together.  The trilling sound of “illimited”, another word coined by Hardy, suggests the bird’s song and the alliterated “l” continues over the next five lines – “illimited/frail/small/blast/beruffled/plume/fling/soul/gloom” in an outpouring of song.  The thrush is “aged” – like the century has aged - until it seems to be barely hanging on to life; it is being battered by the wind.  There is a poignant contrast between the force of the wind in “blast” and the softness and fragility of “beruffled plume”.  None of this, however, can stop him singing his heart out. 

So little cause for carolings 

                Of such ecstatic sound 

Was written on terrestrial things 

                Afar or nigh around, 

That I could think there trembled through 

                His happy good-night air 

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 

                And I was unaware. 

Hardy reflects on why this bird should choose to sing (“carolings” again suggests harmony between people, as they come together to sing) with such joyous abandon in a landscape which gives no encouragement to it.  The song ”trembles”, a reference to the trilling sound, but also to the contrast between the inhospitability of the bird’s surroundings and the fragility of his singing, as if the “darkling” forces might prevail.  There is also something very simple, innocent and child-like about the phrase “happy good-night air” as well as another typical Hardy punning association – between “good-night” as in “farewell” and “good night” as in pleasant.  The only conclusion Hardy can come to is that the bird knows a reason for being joyous in the face of all this despair – a Hope for the future – which is hidden from Hardy. 

Whether this poem ends on a note of optimism or pessimism is moot.  Is the thrush a “wise thrush”, as in Browning’s poem, knowing better than us, being in tune with the world and his place in it, and hence, full of “rapture”?  Or is he merely a bird that knows nothing of the troubles that beset mankind and is merely a “waking dream” as Keats wonders about his Nightingale?  Does Hardy go away from the scene uplifted by the thrush’s song – or does he remain ignorant of the reason for it?  There may be a clue in the use of “communion” and “carolling” in the evocation of communal singing – perhaps Matthew Arnold’s answer, “be true to one another”, has resonance for Hardy as well. 

Victorian Verse - A Wife in London - Thomas Hardy

This is another poem about the Boer War. A wife receives two communications in quick succession.  In a version found on-line, the two parts have an additional title – “The Tragedy” and “The Irony”, which point up the message of the whole.

London is not a place usually associated with Hardy, who was born and spent much of his life in Dorset.  However, he trained as an architect in London in his twenties and visited frequently.  There is an account of the time he spent in London here.  The evocation of London in this poem is at least as notable as that of the Wife – if not more so. 

The poem has a variety of metric patterns, a mixture of three, four and two beat lines, but the pattern of each stanza is the same.  Whilst the apparent irregularity gives it an uneasy feeling, as it does not settle into a regular beat, the overall regularity of the structure suggests a kind of inevitability.

I--The Tragedy

She sits in the tawny vapour 
                That the City lanes have uprolled, 
                Behind whose webby fold on fold 
Like a waning taper 
                The street-lamp glimmers cold. 

The stanza heading prepares us for the emotional content of the verse, but the focus of this first stanza is very much on the Wife’s surroundings – a foggy evening in London.  This could also be seen as pathetic fallacy – the darkness and gloom mirroring the bad news that is about to be delivered.  However, London was often smothered in fog at this time, from coal-fired homes and factories.  The fog was a dirty yellow colour (“tawny”) as it contained particulates of soot, coal-dust and other pollutants.  It was known as a “pea-souper” for its thickness and colour.  The fog was so thick that it acted almost like a solid – a feature that other poets have exploited, as in TS Eliot’s “The Love-Song of J Alfred Prufrock” (1920) which contains the lines:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, 

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, 

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 

And seeing that it was a soft October night, 

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. 

Fog like this persisted right through until the 1950s, when the first Clean Air Act was introduced, forbidding the burning of coal in homes. 

The fog has rolled up from the City (of London), probably up hill to the suburbs (the City is in the Thames river-valley, which would have added to the density of the fog).  It is described as “webby” suggesting it is clinging and sticky like a spiders’web.  The streetlamps, which would have been gaslights, are seen as dimly as if they were candles.  “Cold” adds to the dreariness of the evening, as the faint light brings no comfort.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly, 
                Flashed news is in her hand 
                Of meaning it dazes to understand 
Though shaped so shortly: 
                He--has fallen--in the far South Land . . . 

The Wife receives a telegram – a short message sent, most probably by 1899 in London, electronically.  The use of “flashed” harks back to an earlier time when messages were sent by means of Morse code and flashing lights – the pattern of “On” and “Off” spelling out letters.  Telegrams were received by a Telegraph Office and delivered by hand.  They came to be well-known as bearers of bad news, as their use suggested that the message was too urgent to be delivered by the normal postal system – which at this time, was significantly faster than modern day post.  There is some irony in the contrast between the efficiency (“cracks smartly”) and speed (“flashed”), with which the message is delivered, emphasised by the consonance (“knock/cracks”) and assonance (“cracks/flashed/hand”), and the suggestion that it simply appears in her hand, (“is in”) without intermediary, and the Wife’s dazed incomprehension of a message she would rather have not received at all, let alone with such haste. The abruptness of the message is conveyed in the alliterated and clipped "shaped so shortly"  whilst the hyphenation, in contrast, draws out the final line, reproducing her puzzlement as she tries to grasp the meaning of the text – her husband has died in the Boer War in Africa.

II--The Irony 

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker, 
                The postman nears and goes: 
                A letter is brought whose lines disclose 
By the firelight flicker 
                His hand, whom the worm now knows: 

The irony of the title is created by the different speeds of communication between the Telegram and the post.  The next day she receives a letter through the post from her husband, written and sent while he was still alive, but overtaken by the telegram announcing his death.  This time the news is delivered leisurely – the fog is thicker, slowing movement, the postman “nears and goes”, almost unremarked, the rhythm suggesting a leisurely “to-ing and fro-ing”.  The letter is brought to her by someone else, probably a maid (“is brought”) as she sits by the fireside.  She reads it by firelight, which is not strong and steady, but “flickering” suggesting the fragility of life.  Hardy’s use of metonomy – “His hand” – is creepy here.  “His Hand” means “his handwriting”, but as it is immediately followed by the idea of “worm(s)” knowing “his hand” as well as she does, the word “hand” becomes synonymous with his body, buried in the ground.  I wonder, also, if anyone else read “worm” as “warm”, following on the idea from the fire?  If so, it is probably a deliberate trick by Hardy. 

Fresh--firm--penned in highest feather - 
                Page-full of his hoped return, 
                And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn 
In the summer weather, 
                And of new love that they would learn. 

The final stanza develops the idea of her reading his handwriting.  It is assured, written confidently (“highest feather”).  There is a ghost of a pun here – “penned” means “written in “ and pens were made from the quills, or feathers, of geese and swans until the mid-19^th century.  The letter has pages describing how he hopes for his return home and the trips he has planned for them into the countryside in the summer – “brake” means a clearing in a wood and “burn” is a small stream.  The last line is ambiguous and perhaps explains the naming of this as a “Tragedy”.  What is this “new love”?  Does it mean “renewed”, as in finding the love between them again, after absence, or does it suggest a “new love” for a baby, either already conceived, or, hopefully, to be so, which they will learn to love?