Jane Eyre is one of my favourite books, with one of the most feisty and resourceful heroines in English literature. Virginia Woolf found the emotional lives of the characters in… Read More »Jane Eyre's first encounter with Rochester:Chapter 12- A short Analysis on the irony of retrospect!
Human intimacy can be fraught with misunderstanding and misgiving. We all feel D-R-E-A-D at times! This media age, with its obsession with texting, has escalated the dread of rejection, and… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Text’ from Rapture: An Analysis
Yesterday I explored AQA’s Anthology poem Quickdraw from Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture collection. I did express my disappointment with that poem and perhaps its rather self conscious contrivance.The row didn’t… Read More »An Analysis of Carol Ann Duffy's Disgrace revisited.
Pip is a very susceptible and vulnerable young man, who reads his emotionally sabotaging companions, Miss Havisham and Estella, very hopefully indeed! I have talked in another blog post about… Read More »Dickens' Great Expectations Chapter 29(BkII,Chapter10)Brief Analysis- Pip misreads his destiny!
(For a stanza by stanza analysis and commentary on Quickdraw please click here. ) This poem is taken from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection Rapture, for which she won the T… Read More »AQA English Anthology: Analysis of Carol Ann Duffy’s Quickdraw.
PART ONE. On Saturday I was enjoying a thoughtful discussion of Susan Hill’s novel, The Small Hand. We were analysing the opening line of Susan’s Hill’s ghost story, and exploring several… Read More »AQA/WJEC/Undergraduate English Literature: Analysing a text
George knew all about rooms. He had read about rooms where people started to rot inside and stare at each other across furniture where dust sat waiting, denying them light.… Read More »The Plasticine men three: The importance of Rooms.
T S Eliot’s Little Gidding was his favourite poem. This section of the poem plays with our sense of orientation, our certainties around time and life’s direction. I find I… Read More »T S Eliot Little Gidding: Carol Ann Duffy Beyond the language of the Living?
This plasticine man was small and had a pair of purple legs with green feet and a very round yellow head with orange hair.The others were only one colour. Uniform and… Read More »GCSE English tuition Manchester, Bolton and bury: The plasticine men two.
I love dreaming. Our night walks with out limits. Coach trips with colour. None of those daily conventions like looking at your watch. Being tied to time. But dreams can be… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Night Writing: Images working their hearts out?
We came from our own country in a red room which fell through the fields, our mother singing our father’s name to the turn of the wheels. My brothers cried,… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's 'Originally' poem from 'The Other Country' and 'Selected Poems':Stanza One.
A student studying at Winstanley College, Wigan, shared this tip yesterday and right in the middle of a mock English A level paper, I couldn’t help smiling out loud! For… Read More »English GCSE, GCE, postcard learning tip: How to focus your thinking!
Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black must be one of the most unsettling ghost stories ever written. It has a genuine darkness that eats away at your imagination, hijacking… Read More »GCSE descriptive writing: Susan Hill's short Masterclass of an opening!
It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put… Read More »Dickens' Great Expectations, Chapter 8: Why does Pip fall in love?
Great Expectations begins in a churchyard with a young boy called Pip trying to work out how he came to be born. He believes that he can begin to define… Read More »Great Expectations by Charles Dickens- A Revisited Review and analyis.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours… Read More »Thomas Hardy: Afterwards Analysis and Thoughts.
I was thinking about enthusiasm last night. I went to my daughter’s parents evening with my daughter(how things have changed for the good!) and couldn’t help noticing how we left… Read More »English Tuition in Bolton and Manchester: Why enthusiasm makes 'me' feel better!
What do we really know of others or ourselves? I may sometimes complacently profess ‘self knowledge’ but very often I surprise ‘myself ‘ and I do believe we are all… Read More »Sheenagh Pugh's The Bereavement of the Lionkeeper poem
For a change I will write underneath each stanza of Carol Ann Duffy’s Crush and discuss the poem in this way. My main concern with this method is that it… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Crush: Analysis and thoughts revisited.
This poem declares its imaginative mission with a moving, compassionate simplicity, framed by the speculative, ‘If’. We enter the poem with this tentatively held permission to ‘tell it backwards’, after… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Last Post: An Analysis Revisited.
Reading by Moira Eribenne (revisited 18/12/2011) Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Prayer’ : Analysis and Revisitation by Moira Eribenne
I spoke yesterday about the casually cold tone of the poem. The tone is essential to the poem’s message and meaning as it is suggestive of the voice of the speaker… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Stealing: Analysis of First Two stanzas
This is a cold poem in more ways than one.The subject matter is seasonally icy and so is the tone of the speaker. The insouciant delivery suggests pride and even aggressive… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy’s Stealing -An Analysis and thoughts.(Part One)
I read this shortly after W H Auden’s famous poem Funeral Blues -both deeply moving poems about monumental loss. Both poems suggesting that (like Mansfield’s story, The Life of Ma Parker) ‘There was nowhere’ left… Read More »Sheenagh Pugh: The Bereavement of the Lion- Keeper An Analysis
(I read this last night as part of a WJEC GCE past English paper. A lovely gift of a poem). I love this poem’s intimacy. The speaker grumbles his way… Read More »WH Auden: Roman Wall Blues Analysis and thoughts.
Carol Ann Duffy’s Demeter is one of my favourite poems and moves me intensely. I think its position at the close of Duffy’s The World’s Wife is essential as it… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Demeter inspired this story about Shapes!
”Where I lived-winter and hard earth. I sat in my cold stone rooom choosing tough words, granite, flint, to break the ice.My broken heart- I tried that, but it skimmed,… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Demeter and Miss Havisham's room.
Great Expectations is being shown over Christmas. It’s a new version with Gillian Anderson playing Miss Havisham. I was struck by a comment about Ms Anderson’s portrayal, made in a Telegraph… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Medusa, Demeter, Havisham and Mrs Lazarus- Stones, Mourning and Identity!
Apparently this poem by Rosssetti and set to music by Holst, was voted the United Kingdom’s favourite carol . Today, walking my two dogs around a deserted park, I found myself singing the… Read More »Christina Rossetti and Carol Ann Duffy : In the Bleak Midwinter.
This is one of my favourite Carol Ann Duffy poems. It appears in Mean Time and has a witty pathos all of its own. Even as the poet receates… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Litany: An analysis revisited.
