GCSE Unseen poetry: Wilfred Owen’s The Send Off- Advice/ Tips and example.

The GCSE Unseen poetry question seems challenging not least because it is a ‘blind date’ and can sometimes throw students, because they worry about their ability to understand an unknown text –  poem(or poems) under timed examination conditions. 

So how can you minimize your worry about this question,and what techniques can help you whatever the poem(s)?

Let’s explore a poem by Wilfred Owen called The Send -Off  and see how you could respond effectively whatever your mood.

 

Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beating of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
Up half-known roads.

If we consider the poem in relation to the poet’s viewpoint, and the way he creates this ‘send-off’ scene through his observations, then it is important to note down our immediate feelings about the tone and apparent message of the poem.

So your FIRST action in your analysis of an unseen poem is to make a note of your ‘verdict’ on the ppoem through its message and effect on you.

Remember to consider WHO is the narrator in the poem and HOW this affects the meaning.

Once you have this GOVERNING IDEA and sense of EMOTION and TONE, then you can begin to analyse the poem through TRACKING  how you have come to these ideas.

TRACK back through the poem and pick at least THREE moments that are INTERESTING/IMPORTANT/STRANGE with regard to the governing idea.

Let’s summarize: #

1) Governing idea/Topic sentence(s) related to your overall reading of the poem related to the question.

2) Attach an emotion(s) to your governing idea.

3) TRACK back through the poem, preferably from the beginning in order to explore HOW you arrived at your original opinion/verdict. Notice anything STRANGE! 

4) Pick out features and relate to their EFFECT on your reading. Use verbs of suggesting and seeming and even the word perhaps! 

 

So let’s try out this formula and see how easy it is to feel more confident  about your unseen poem.#

1) The poem seems to explore the experience of soldiers’ leaving their training camp, heading off on a night train for the front. We learn that they are not ‘ours’ and this lack of ownership makes their leaving unimpressive and without affection or interest. This is an ironically low key ‘send-off’.  The quietness of the poem’s sounds, and the slow pace and rhythm are suggestive of  resignation and melancholy,  and lend a fateful inevitability to the soldiers’ probable death.

 

2) The reader senses a secrecy about the poem and this secrecy is linked to  sorrow and even a slightly conspiratorial feeling, ‘winked to the guard’,  reinforced by their leaving in the night, ‘darkening lanes’  and having only a couple of desultory people watching their send-off, one of whom just misses his opportunity to beg from them, ‘sorry to miss them’.   Perhaps the title itself helps the reader to feel the link between this furtive/secret farewell and mortality.

3) The strange, oxymoronic ‘grimly gay’ early in the poem underlines the soldiers’ awareness of the impending threat of death on the front and gives a stoicism to their characters. This is further reinforced by the alliteration of the two ‘g’s that catch in the throat, signifying a kind of guttural brave response to fear perhaps. They are determined to do their duty but are all too aware of the price of their obligation.

4) The poem’s interest in flowers and the deliberate conflation of the ‘send-off’ flowers and those that could be used as a wreath when they have died, injects the poem with a melancholic atmosphere where time itself slips from one moment to another , suggesting that this moment is fateful and foreshadows the soldiers’ slaughter at the front. It is as if the poem inhabits a double time and this scene anticipates or even hallucinates the eventual outcome.

 

5) The send-off ends with the merest hint of a rturn for the supposedly ‘lucky few’ who will in fact be burdened with their survival and the suffering associated with their survival. The imagery deployed to describe their return is again conspiratorial, furtive and secretive, suggesting bathos and pathos simultaneously. Familiarity has become transmuted into forgetfulness, either because they have never belonged to this place where they are originally sent off, or because trauma induces a terrible forgetting, a lostness that is still palpably present, through the repetition of ‘few’ and the diminished familiarity with the reference to’ half known roads.’ 

The ending is certainly in the beginning for these soldiers!