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CONFLICT POETRY COMPARISONS
Hello, welcome to another tutorial video. So in light of the requests, I’ve actually
made a comparison list of the Conflict poems, which ones can be compared with other ones.
Now before I look at this at all, and I did just go over the poems, it’s probably the
first time I’ve looked at them all like that in one go, I reckon that you could compare
anything with anything and still do very well, still get an A. There’s only two that don’t
fit in very well with everything else and that’s ‘Flag’ and ‘Hawk Roosting’.
I know ‘Flag’ isn’t going to be on there. I can’t remember whether ‘Hawk Roosting’
will be but ‘Flag’ definitely isn’t going to be on the Higher paper as the actual
named question. There’s two others but forgive me, they escape me right now. So we’ll just
look at all of them and then see where we get to.
So every single poem is mentioned in here and I’ve got the general theme or idea that
might have been mentioned or actually comes across very strong and then the link, or the
way it’s actually linked. And then we’ve got an alternative suggestion just so we kind
of catch everything in. Now this is just one way of looking at it. You could make 60 of
these lists and they’d all still be deadly accurate. So if the first thing you see that
I’ve put here isn’t the first thing that came to you, then don’t worry about it,
whatever you know works for you, you’ve got your SMILE points, you’ve got your teacher’s
notes, you may have your revision guide; whatever gives you an instruction and you feel comfortable
with, that’s what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to write about what you feel confident
about but it was asked for so these are the ones I think just kind of sync in with each
other quite nicely.
So we start with ‘At The Border’ and that’s looking at peoples’ lives and I thought
it was really good to compare it to ‘Out of the Blue’ because they’re sustained
events and there’s the positive idea that these people are actually going to get out
of the situation and there’s a negative connotation that he’s not getting out of
it. At the same time these people are quite deluded about the situation they’re in,
thinking that everything is going to be better, whereas this person’s very accepting and
realistic about his situation. So you can actually mix and match and play around with
that. And ‘Poppies’ is an interesting addition to this because it’s also looking
at peoples’ lives, looking at the life of the mother and how she deals with it and obviously
the perspectives are different and the language and the tone are very different, so there’s
a lot to compare and contrast.
Moving on then to ‘Yellow Palm’. Well, ‘Yellow Palm’ really focuses on an anti-war
message, that’s probably the strongest thing we get throughout that and we get that from
‘Mametz Wood’ as well, and both of them have really negative connotations and also
they’ve got the visitor’s experience in both. So again, there’s a lot of things
to actually compare and there’s a lot of imagery in both as well, so there’s a lot
to actually analyse and compare and link. And another comparison you can add to that
is the ‘Come On, Come Back’ where we’ve got this other person’s experience being
commented on again but this one’s more absurd and this one actually takes it to an extent
that’s more similar to ‘Mametz Wood’ in that there’s death at the end of it,
clearly mentioned, whereas in this one it’s obviously alluded to but we don’t actually
see the dead but we know there’s death but it’s just not directly in front of us. They
both obviously have the negative connotations in there, the anti-war.
We’ve got the ‘Bayonet Charge’ next, and that’s focusing on a soldier’s experience
primarily and that can straight away be compared to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’,
both of the negative actions in what they were actually doing, even though the outcome
for one is slightly more positive than the other. Again, that’s a comparison point
and we can add that to ‘Mametz Wood’ if we were looking at the soldier’s experience
and imagined it after they die as well. It gives us a very interesting other angle.
So looking at ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ we can look at patriots, patriotism, etc.,
and ‘Flag’ is the one that actually came forward and the reason I picked that one was
because you’ve got the following of orders and then the ambiguity of ideas and I thought
they contrasted – if you look through the videos and every single one of those was very
ambiguous, and the reason I think that these actually will compare is because they are
both focusing on the patriotism, although one is doing it very ambiguously, making you
wonder what it could mean, whereas the other one was unquestioning. So you’ve got that
similarity and contrast straight away to actually delve into.
Remember, you’re only going to talk about two, maybe three, four points in the whole
thing, in terms of your main ideas or your feelings, themes, attitudes that you’re
actually going to discuss and then you’re going to really flesh it out with analysis
of all the things that support and bring you to that and if you haven’t already watched,
please, please have a look at the A/A* example material that’s already up.
Moving on then to ‘The Falling Leaves’. Well that’s really focusing on death as
is ‘Poppies’ and the tone of those two is very similar, both the writers’ backgrounds
in that are similar and they’ve got the look from the outside, compared to ‘The
Charge of the Light Brigade’, because that’s also about death but it’s in a much more
heroic sense than the soft, consideration of death that we find in these two poems.
‘Belfast Confetti’. That, well again that’s one of the harder one to actually link to
anything else. We look at the way people are treated so that allows us to compare it with
‘At the Border 1979’ and we’ve got this immediate reaction to how they’re treated
by police, you know, being held up against the wall and asked questions and in these
ones it’s very slow, but again it’s still a degradation, they’ve both been degraded
but the pacing is very different. And I compared that also to ‘Right Word’ because even
though the poet’s only talking about the person that turns out to be a child outside,
the main emphasis that we’re getting is that she’s still judging that person, therefore
she’s still treating them differently and she’s still coming to her own conclusions
about them.
Moving on to ‘Come On, Come Back’ we can look at the absurdity of war and we can compare
that to ‘Futility’ because of the idea of the sun recharging here and this is the
whole poem in ‘Come On, Come Back’ that really helps us focus on the absurdity of
war, but the tone is very different in both. One’s kind of more satirical and one’s
just very sombre. And we can also add ‘The Right Word’ to that connection because the
absurdity of what’s going on there is that she thinks through all these ideas before
she actually knows the truth and obviously the first one couldn’t have been further
from the truth when we know the end result.
Moving on then to ‘Flag’. Well ‘Flag’ is very ambiguous, has very philosophical
ideas, thinking about the nature of things and is a flag this or is a flag that or is
a flag this or is a flag that? And that allows us to think about the right word as well,
thinking of others and how they are and how we judge them, etc., and the power of words.
So there we’re looking at the power of words and how they’re linked and here we’re
looking at the power again of something, but something different, we’re looking at the
power of the flag itself and what it represents, and with that any ornament or any object,
artefact should I say.
We move on then to the last one, ‘Futility’. So ‘Futility’ here is really focusing
on death and to some extent absurdity and we can link that to the ‘Hawk Roosting’
because the thoughts on power there are very absurd as well and he brings death wherever
he goes. And we can link that later on to ‘Come On, Come Back’ which again deals
with the absurdity and death, so it’s very fitting in that trilogy there.
So all these things that I’ve picked out, like I said before, they’re not the only
ways of doing it but some people asked for a video on it, so I was happy to oblige and
I hope that’s useful and all the best of luck with the exam.