1. POETRY ANTHOLOGY Revising poetry comparison

2. The most important thing! The examiner wants to see that you can write appreciatively about the ideas within the poems. He/she wants to see that you understand what the poet wanted to say Alliteration, caesuras, powerful verbs, metaphors, personification, sibilance etc……. mean nothing at all on their own! Poetic devices are only relevant if you can see how the poet has used them as a way of expressing their ideas.

3. It doesn’t make sense, therefore, to start a paragraph by mentioning a poetic technique. Owen uses repetition….. There is a refrain at the end of every stanza….

4. Planning It is only by planning that you will avoid this and will write meaningfully about poems. Not everything that you know about a poem will be relevant and your plan will help you to focus only on the topic given in the question. The topic in the last question was “suffering”. How should you start paragraphs then?

5. Planning helps you to identify topic sentences and focus on the question Suffering Suffering of a group Physical suffering Mental suffering On going suffering The horror of seeing others dying Suffering of an individual The looter dies in agony The cold/ suffering exposure The stress of waiting “All their eyes are ice” The looter Owen & the other soldiers The narrator “Remains” Owen feels abandoned The men suffer doubt. Why are they there? “Remains”: guilt “Remains”: drink & drugs can’t stop it….

6. Use the plan to create topic sentences. Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence using the key word(s) in the question The most obvious kind of suffering that is presented in “Exposure” is the physical suffering of the soldiers in the cold weather…… Using the ideas on the mind map, write a topic sentence to start a paragraph.

7. PEAPEA Once you have your topic sentence Don’t compare! The topic sentence is P.... You need a whole paragraph on the poem before you change poems and change paragraphs.

8. PEAPEA E Find the best example you can to illustrate your topic sentence: The most obvious kind of suffering that is presented in “Exposure” is the physical suffering of the soldiers in the cold weather…… “ Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…..”

9. PEAPEA A This is where your language or structure point comes in and you can show that you recognize and understand how poetic devices have been used. Look back to the quotation that you chose to illustrate your point. Explain why the poets choice of words is effective.

10. A The most obvious kind of suffering that is presented in “Exposure” is the physical suffering of the soldiers in the cold weather…… “ Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…..” Owen uses the adjective “ache” to show how the cold has got inside the men’s heads. He also personifies the wind so that it seems like an enemy with a weapon cutting into them. This makes the suffering of the soldiers seem extreme but it is also ironic as it makes the threat from the weather seem worse that that from the Germans. The title of the poem is “Exposure” so the reader starts to realise that the men’s lives are in danger from the freezing conditions they’re enduring.

11. Next paragraph This is where you compare. Look back to your plan. Just as there is physical suffering in “Exposure”, the looter in “Remains” is also described in extreme pain. Once he has been shot, the speaker in the poem describes him as: “pain itself, the image of agony.” These are especially effective metaphors because instead of just seeming to be in pain, the man has become everything that sums up suffering to the speaker.

12. Compare Now in a separate paragraph, write a comparative point.

13. London Make a mind map of the suffering in London. Suffering

14. Now look at your own essay. On a full page in your exercise book, write out advice for yourself. Use my comments but also add your own. Use highlighters and colours, illustrations and underlinings. Sum up what you have learnt today about structuring your essay when comparing two poems. Make sure that it is clear that this page is essential for your revision and that this power point is in the Q drive to use for revision purposes.