English Literature Coursework Steps for improvement

“The Beast” 6 poems 3 major 3 subsidiary This difference must be clear in your essay – ensure you extend your writing on the three majors: Sonnet 116, Remember and Mother in a Refugee Camp.

Simple gifts: Help the examiner and moderator – they want to give you high marks. Turn on your spell check and use it! Proof read anyway – thoroughly Turn on grammar check… “This shows in the poem when it reads “The star to every wondering bark.” guess what we feel when we read this?

Grammar 1 Proper nouns start with capitals. The names of poems are proper nouns. For real clarity, underline the titles whenever you use them. “ In Remember the imperative “remember” is used when the persona seems to need her partner to remember her…” 3 remembers- each a different form of the word…

SPaG Common errors to address Might of/might have Number: “the message of the two stanzas are…” Check all spellings – nothing says “I don’t care” like common misspellings – especially of homophones – there/there is a common issue for many. Remember to punctuate. Too many paragraphs are missing full stops; even in quotation punctuation is miscopied…

CONTENT AND STYLE

FOCUS Answer the question. Do not simply write about the poems – there is a focus. This means PLAN! Go back to the beginning and make a skeleton plan

Use a flow chart Arg 1 Arg 2 Arg 3 Arg 4 Arg 5 Arg 6 116 3 paras, didactic- everlasting/ guidance/ edge of doom Arg 2 71 Earlier, less selfish – can be allowed to lapse if causing too much pain Arg 3 Remember LONG Ultimately similar to 71, but opening 8ve – imperatives and insistence closer to 116, uses euphemism to soften blow – real situation Arg 4 Piano Pain of remembering is clear – focus on flood of remembrance, painful; memory Arg 5 DNGG also painful and also didactic – focus on never giving in to death because of strength of love Arg 6 MIRC :LONG focus on never giving up t o link with DNGG, sense of “tempest” in diarrhea, maternal love as indicated in intertextual image at opening of the poem…

At this stage To test your plan, try to write a short outline of the argument, using one or two sentences at the most to represent each paragraph and still using no evidence or analysis. “Love is presented in a wide range of ways, for a thing of joy to a medium for inflicting great pain and from an everlasting power to an element which has to be laid aside to avoid sorrow. In Sonnet 116 love is presented in didactic verse as being everlasting and having the quality of protection and guidance for humans leading an otherwise formless life. This contrasts with the view presented in sonnet 71 which requires love to be left aside and no mourning to take place for a dead lover, Ideas which Rossetti picks up in Remember. Here she seems worried that her lover should forget her, before finding a generosity of spirit and suggesting that he should be able to forget her for a while to avoid pain. She shows her love in her wish to soften the blow of death by the euphemisms and generally soft tone to the poem – though the comment about “our future which you planned” might suggest some unevenness in the relationship. DH Lawrence looks at the idea of love being revisited form the perspective of a son recalling his mother and suffering pain as the memories and the love comes flooding back. He feels unmanned by this and might prefer the model of Sonnet 71 as a result. Another son/parent relationship is shown in Do not go gentle… where Thomas reflects on his love for his dying Father by begging him to continue to fight and rage until the very end of his life – feeling blessed if this happens. In mother in a refugee camp, this attitude is seen by the mother who will not let her child die by simply giving in to illness but seeks to maintain a pride in life by her care for him. The language is stark and scatalogically obscene, possibly suggesting that this is love in the 116 mould – it surely is surviving the kind of storm mentioned by Shakespeare. The fact that love for the dead is so painful means that the mother will need to forget her child after his death – Something not foreseen by Shakespeare, but which DH Lawrence supports by reference to the pain that “love-remembered” can produce. Jonathan Peel JLS 2015

Ad ‘Astar’… You need to work with language, structure and form… On Structure – make it work for you to actually develop a point… “DNGG is a villanelle which helps to show love in a positive way” gains little. Why?

Better to engage with structure “DNGG is a villanelle which causes the repetition of the opening lines throughout the poem. The stanzas are 3 lines long until the last stanza. The addition of a fourth line to give the requisite 19 line structure ensures tha the poem ends on the positive imperative “rage, rage” rather than with the negative “Do not go gentle…”. Ultimately the message received is positive, demanding tha tone continues to fight against death for as longf as is possible”

SMALLS Get rid of writing in the 2nd person. Analysis is objective- 3rd person. You can bring in personal opinion however in 1st person. Remove lazy phraseology: “in this poem it says…” It says nothing – the poet has spend hours puzzling over the right group of words to create effect – focus on what the poet wrote. Remove passive voice: This adds words and creates convoluted phrasing. Be direct and be clear; “it is also touched upon that love is finite…”

Smalls Does your writing make sense? Read it aloud to see: “Marriage of true mind” is the union of ideas of what love is and is the conventional idea of marriage. It is the play on the word “marriage” to bring together the idea of the coming together of different ideas, and the coming together of two people in love (sic)