Rooms are places of deep psycholgical unrest in Dickens. People feel trapped in spaces where age old drama are played out again and again. Repetition signifies deadly stasis and sterility.… Read More »Dickens' David Copperfield: A brief analysis of rooms.
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.
If ‘home’ is often a place of comforting repetition and ritual, Pip’s home with the ‘rampaging’ Mrs Joe in Dickens’ Great Expectations is a place of imaginative improvisation and daily… Read More »Charles Dickens' Great Expectations Chapter 8:Pip and his beginner's mind!
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!
It began when they moved house of course. They had all been quite settled as their Aunt Dorothy used to say to anyone who would listen during her weekly trips to the supermarket.… Read More »English Tuition in Manchester, Bolton and Bury: The Plasticine men.
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.
Dickens was an energetic walker and more than an occasional insomniac. His esssay ‘Night walks ‘ collected in The Uncommercial Traveller explores the experience of sleepnessness as experienced by a… Read More »Charles Dickens' Night Walks: Analysis and thoughts.
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
A Saturday Morning revisitation. The exotic security of primary education is superbly captured in this poem. This seemingly oxymoronic combination fosters learning of the most enduring kind, as the… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy’s In Mrs Tilscher’s Class Analysis and thoughts: Revisited! FREE VIDEO!
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!
Carol Ann Duffy conveys the abject stoniness of grief in her poem, Mrs Lazarus. The widow of the most famous ‘miracle’ in the Christian Bible narrates her own ‘death’ after… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Lazarus analysis revised.
New Tusi Note now available to download and buy. Just the ideas you need to be different! The idea of any existence before ‘me’ often seems rather weird- a try… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy :’Before you were mine’ An Analysis Revisited. FREE VIDEO!
Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry features on many GCSE, A Level and Undergraduate courses. Her poems are some of the most searched for on Google and on Amazon underlining her justifiable… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy Selected Poems: Analysis, Notes, Ideas.
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.
