Category Archives: Leaving Cert Paper 2

Paper 2 advice and notes.

Poetry vs. Song Lyrics

Posted on May 8, 2011 by | Comments Off on Poetry vs. Song Lyrics

Once upon a time, long long ago, a song and a poem were published side by side on the Junior Cert exam paper, unseen poetry section. Students were asked to discuss the difference between the style of writing in songs and poems. I stumbled across this question in my first year of teaching and thought it was incredibly  unfair to ask something so difficult of 15yr olds. I fancied myself as a singer-songwriter when I was a teenager and as an adult had dabbled in writing poetry but I still had to think long and hard to verbalise the difference between the two. I knew the difference but found it hard to put it into words. In the end I decided the best way to become fully conscious of the differences was to change a poem into a song and then look at how the language changed.

So here’s the poem we chose:

Funeral Blues
W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

—–

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,

Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

—–

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,

I thought that love would last forever: ‘I was wrong’

—–

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

We decided that a song would need simpler imagery, everyday slang /direct speech, repetition of key ideas for the chorus, short snappy phrases to create a regular beat/rhythm, end-rhyme, and a bridge before the second chorus. With the help of a rhyming dictionary we butchered it, removed the essence (and lost the beauty). Here’s what we came up with:

Funeral Blues Song Lyrics

All of this noise keeps dragging me down to a place I cannot go,

All of these noises echo in the emptiness of my soul,

Clocks ticking. Phones ringing. Heart beating but I feel so low,

See his face when I close my eyes but then I realise

He ain’t never comin’ home

CHORUS:

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong, I was wrong.

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong, I was wrong.

I put my faith in love but I was so naive

Now he is dead and gone and I can only grieve,

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

—–

Everyone’s life keeps trundling on but I’m here frozen in the street,

You gave me direction, without you I’m lost & lonely & incomplete

The stars burn out. The sun fades out. Oceans weep from my swollen eyes.

Try to find some will to fight on but then I realise

He ain’t ever comin home.

BRIDGE:

And nothing now can ever come to any good.

And nothing now can ever come to any good.

I trusted in forever – I misunderstood

And nothing now can ever come to any good.

CHORUS

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong, I was wrong.

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong, I was wrong.

I put my faith in love but I was so naive

Now he is dead and gone and I can only grieve,

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

—–

I think the comparison illustrates the difference well but something (a lot in fact) does get lost in translation. The sheer force of Auden’s pain is brilliantly captured in the final verse where he imagines the entire universe as a empty house to be abandoned and left behind “pour away the oceans and sweep up the woods” now that his lover is gone. I think a better songwriter than me might be able to keep the beauty of that imagery and still create a catchy love song/lament. I also think that the impact of the desolate final line is lost if you keep repeating it over and over. It’s much more effective to just hear it once and let the sadness sink into your bones.

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Unseen poetry

Posted on May 4, 2011 by | Comments Off on Unseen poetry

Generally speaking you can answer one 20 mark question or two 10 mark questions so we’ll deal with them separately here.

The 20mark question usually goes a little something like this:

  • Write a personal response to this poem, highlighting the impact it makes on you.
  • Describe the impact this poem makes on you as a reader.

As with studied poetry you are expected to include sentences which use the pronoun ‘I‘.

  1. Talk about how the poems made you feel.
  2. Identify what they taught you, how they made you look at an issue(s) in a new way.
  3. Mention how these themes are relevant to your life.
  4. Discuss what you enjoyed in the poet’s style of writing. 

Remember though, no matter what the question, you are expected to quickly figure out the message/theme of the poem, identify some techniques, and comment on the feelings created in the poem and in you. DO NOT go off on a long rambling tangent about how this poem reminds you of this thing that happened to you once. Mention the poem’s relevance to your life in passing but stay focused – your job is to discuss and interpret the poem and how the poem affects you emotionally/intellectually not to talk about yourself (you can do this in Paper 1 QB and essay).  

10 mark questions

Questions on the mood/feelings/atmosphere (see poetic techniques & terminology)

  • What is the mood of this poem and how is it conveyed?
  • How does this poem make you feel? Explain by detailed reference to the poem.
  • How well does the poem capture the boy’s sense of excitement and hope?
  • Choose two phrases which best capture the girl’s feelings. Give reasons for your choices.

Questions on the setting (see language of narration / descriptive writing)

  • Do you like the world that the poet describes in this poem? Give reasons for your answer.

Questions on the imagery/ style of writing (see poetic techniques & terminology)

  • Choose one image/line from this poem that appealed to you. Explain your choice.
  • The poem uses beautiful imagery to capture an ugly reality. Discuss.
  • The poem makes effective use of irony – discuss.

Questions on the poet/speaker/characters in the poem

  • What impression do you get of ….. the poet’s father – the father/son relationship? (see list of character traits).
  • What impact does this childhood experience have on the poet/speaker?
  • What kind of life do you think the speaker lives?

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Studied poetry – questions

Posted on May 3, 2011 by | Comments Off on Studied poetry – questions

When the new course began in 2001, the type of questions that came up were pretty predictable and mostly revolved around giving a personal response to a poet. Since 2007 (and the public debate around grade inflation/rote learning) the questions have become more specific and ask you to discuss particular aspects of a poet’s work. What this means in effect is that you need to know the poet – it’s not enough to just learn off a personal response essay and write it in the exam. You MUST respond to the question asked and use an appropriate style (are you writing a speech? an article? a letter? a critical analysis?) and tone (who are your audience).

Let’s look at the more predictable Q’s (which were entirely absent from the 2010 and 2011 papers)

  1. Personal response = expected to include sentences which use the pronoun ‘I‘. Talk about how the poems made you feel. Identify what they taught you, how they made you look at an issue(s) in a new way. Discuss what you enjoyed in the poet’s style of writing. Explore how these themes are relevant to your life.
  2. Discuss the feelings the poet creates in you. They have on occasions specified certain feelings. For example, unhappiness in Larkin’s poetry, tension in Walcott’s poetry, sadness in Frost’s poetry, Plath as ‘intense & disturbing’. So make sure you know both what feelings the poet expresses in their work and what feelings the poems create in you.
  3. Relevance for the modern reader. This came up in 2002 as a specific question on Bishop.
  4. Appeal of a poet  – what you like and/or dislike about their poetry. Very similar to personal response.
  5. Introduce a poet to new readers giving an overview of their themes & style and explaining why you think they would enjoy reading these poems. This could be in the style of an article or written as a speech/talk for classmates. More informal style.
  6. Write a letter to the poet. You might want to ask them questions, where their inspiration come from etc…
  7. Choose a small selection for inclusion in an anthology & justify your selection. You would choose maybe 3 poems, one to represent each major theme in their ouvre.

Ultimately, however, no matter what the question you are still expected to demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the poet’s themes & style of writing, supporting this with detailed quotations.

There is one more type of question and this is the one which has dominated since 2010:

       8. A specific statement about the poet which you must discuss.

Since 2007, more and more questions have started to appear which demand that you respond to a specific question, discussing to what extent you agree or disagree with it or asking you to prove the truth of the statement (a lot like what you do for the Hamlet question). In 2007 two of the four questions did this (Frost & Plath) while two were personal response. In 2008, two of the four again made a specific statement you had to discuss (Donne & Mahon) while two were more personal response (Larkin & Rich). In 2009 only one was very specific (Walcott) while the other three just specified that you discuss BOTH themes and style in your answer (they talked about a ‘clear’ style for Keats & Montague and a ‘unique’ style for Bishop). As an aside, they keep mentioning the style of writing because a lot of students focus too much on themes (what the poet says) but forget to comment on techniques (how the poet says it) which is vital in any discussion of poetry – including your unseen section.

In 2010 ALL FOUR QUESTIONS mentioned specific aspects of a poet’s work. For Yeats it was real v’s ideal, for Rich it was themes of power and powerlessness, for Kavanagh it was transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and for Eliot it was troubled characters in a disturbing world. In 2011 ALL FOUR QUESTIONS mentioned specific aspects of a poet’s work. For Yeats it was challenging style and subject matter, for Dickinson it was original startling and thought-provoking poetry, for Boland it was insights and precise language, for Frost it was deceptively simple style with layers of meaning. If you learn off an essay and stick to it rigidly you will not be answering the question (or not be able to answer the question) and the only way you can get a good grade in poetry is to answer the question. In other words, you need to really understand what the poet is about. I hate when students ask me if it’s true that you don’t need to discuss 6 poems in your essay. The simple answer is yes. But if you only know 3 poems by a poet you might not be able to answer the question that comes up. It all depends what appears on the day.

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Tragic Hero?

Posted on April 29, 2011 by | 4 comments

Just what is a tragic hero? Obviously someone who is ‘tragic’ has suffered a great deal and we feel sorry for them. Someone who is a ‘hero’ is someone we admire and respect. The definition of the tragic hero in literature is only slightly more complex. You need to look for the following three elements.

The tragic hero

  1. commands our respect and sympathy
  2. possesses some human flaw in character or judgement which partially brings about his downfall
  3. recognises that he is somewhat to blame

Two other elements are worth mentioning. The first is that the consequences far outweigh the fault – in simple terms, he suffers far more than he deserves to. The second is that his suffering provokes an emotional response in the reader – the ‘tragedy’ is created because we are filled with grief & sympathy at the unfairness of what he has to endure.

If we apply this definition to Hamlet you’ll see that he

  1. Immediately commands our respect & sympathy. He obeys his mother despite his disgust at her behaviour. He values honesty “I have that within which passes show”. He is grieving his dead father & attempts to come to terms with his mother’s betrayal which evokes our sympathy. He is suicidal but moral “o that the everlasting had not fixed his cannon against self-slaughter” and aware of his duty to obey the King “it is not nor it cannot come to good but break my heart for I must hold my tongue”. He is described by Ophelia as ‘honourable’ and treats Horatio as a friend rather than as a subject (proving that he has no sense of being ‘better’ than others despite his royal blood).  You then need to look at how our sympathy for him ebbs and flows however. There are moments when we struggle to accept his behaviour – for example his reaction to killing Polonius, his decision to send R&G to their deaths and his treatment of Laertes in the graveyard. However, he regains his nobility somewhat when he exchanges forgiveness with Laertes, when he finally kills Claudius, when he saves Horatio, and in the tributes paid to him by Horatio & Fortinbras. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)
  2. Possesses some human flaw in character or judgement which partially brings about his downfall. His ‘flaw’ is his procrastination, although this is a flaw we can admire. He is determined to establish Claudius’ guilt before he kills him, showing that he is a person who believes in doing the right thing. The deaths of many characters – Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, even R&G can be either directly or indirectly viewed as a consequence of Hamlet’s ‘delay’, his rage at his own inability to act and then his impulsive ‘rash and bloody deed’ in killing Polonius, thinking it was Claudius behind the arras. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)
  3. Recognises that he is somewhat to blame. Throughout the play Hamlet makes reference to his tendency to think rather than act. Almost all of his seven soliloquies involve deeply self-critical commentary. He cannot explain, justify, or even understand “why yet I live to say this thing’s to do”. He is filled with shame when he compares himself to Fortinbras & Laertes. Thus Hamlet absolutely recognises his flaw. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)

The entire play dramatically presents a battle between rage & despair in Hamlet’s soul as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that he must carry out a deed which is anathema to his personality “the time is out of joint o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”. Thus we respect him, feel sympathy for him, recognise (as he does) his flaws and experience his death as deeply tragic yet in some ways inevitable. He ticks all the boxes so a question asking you to discuss whether or not Hamlet is a tragic hero could be fairly straightforward if you just keep these three things in mind!

You could complicate it further IF YOU WANTED TO make your answer more original.

Let’s think for a second about the idea of the anti-hero. This is a character who we ‘admire and feel sympathy for’ so that box is still ticked. What makes the antihero different is their personality – something in their character is different to our usual definition of a ‘hero’. In Hamlet’s case he doesn’t behave the way we expect the hero to behave in a revenge tragedy – we expect him to carry out his revenge quickly and unequivocally, without hesitation. Instead he examines the morality of what he must do, gets sidetracked into arguments with the women in his life, thinks long and hard about killing himself (but as with everything else he talks about, he doesn’t do it!), gives a lecture on good acting to some actors, fails to kill Claudius because he wants him to burn in hell forever, kills Polonius by accident, is sent away, makes a deal with some pirates, comes back and again gets sidetracked – this time into a fencing match which will prove fatal for all of the major characters who aren’t already dead. So his ‘flaw’ (procrastination) is also the thing which makes him more antihero than hero. If you wanted to you could describe him as a tragic antihero rather than as a typical tragic hero. Or you can stick with the simpler definition above.

Now think about this for a second. Do you like him? I find myself torn between sympathy (your mom’s a bitch) and frustration (just do it already!). Psychologists say the traits you most dislike in others are often the things you most dislike about yourself. Let’s apply that to Hamlet for a second – he annoys me because he talks about doing things instead of just doing them. Then I think about myself – I talked about doing this website for well over a year before I actually did anything about it. I keep talking about going to NY but I’ve never been. Right now I should be finalising things for the short story competition but I’m putting it off. Now think about yourself for a minute. Think about all the time you waste talking about and thinking about studying but not actually doing it! If Hamlet irritates you maybe that’s because he is so goddamned HUMAN. So weak, so flawed and so like all of us. Maybe we want our ‘heroes’ on telly, in the movies, in plays, to be more heroic and less real. Paradoxically however, the fact that he is so real, so ordinary, so flawed, so weak, so impulsive and so insecure is what makes him so fascinating, so compelling and so tragic.

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Hamlet – typical questions

Posted on April 27, 2011 by | 2 comments

It’s difficult to predict what questions will come up for the Shakespearean play. A couple of years ago a lot of multinational companies in Ireland complained that graduates were increasingly finding it difficult to critically analyse data – in other words, to think about large amounts of information and pick out what mattered. Simultaneously, concerns were raised about grade inflation – the number of people achieving high grades in school and college exams kept increasing. The population weren’t getting any cleverer, so the exams must be getting easier.

The examinations commission responded and as a result the more predictable (‘there’s always a character Q’ or ‘personal response’ in poetry) questions are disappearing. There is no need to despair however. You know plenty – you just need a strategy to pick out what matters on the day.

If you figure out how to do this then you’ll also have developed a skill that will last you a lifetime, and one which multinational corporations will be looking for when you graduate college and are looking for a job. So it’s not all a big waste of time even if it feels like that now!

First of all let’s look at the broad categories questions usually fall into.

  1. CHARACTER
  2. THEME
  3. OPEN
  4. STYLE

You must be able to discuss the following when it comes to characters:

HAMLET

  • his state of mind (mostly revealed in soliloquies)
  • his ‘madness’
  • his delay (procrastination)
  • his nobility (is he a good man?) / strengths & weaknesses
  • a tragic hero or an anti-hero?
  • his relationship with Claudius (the struggle between them)
  • his relationship with women (Gertrude & Ophelia) & treatment of them

CLAUDIUS  (a good king? a villain? or an admirable villain?)

GERTRUDE (a good mother despite her flaws? a negative portrayal of women?)

OPHELIA (an innocent victim or a weak and foolish girl? a negative portrayal of women?)

I seriously doubt (please don’t let this come back to haunt me) they’ll ask you to discuss one of the minor characters like Polonius or Horatio, but be able to write one paragraph on each as they would be relevant in discussing good versus evil or loyalty and betrayal. You also need to be able to write one paragraph on Fortinbras and one on Laertes for the theme of revenge.

The major themes in the play are:

  • Revenge (and justice)
  • Good versus Evil
  • Loyalty & Betrayal
  • Appearance versus Reality (Deception)
  • Power & Corruption
  • Death
  • Love

For each theme – no matter what the wording – ask yourself

  1. WHO does this theme apply to?
  2. HOW / WHY does this character have to deal with this issue?
  3. Do they CHANGE over the course of the play?
  4. Are there any SCENES which highlight this theme specifically?
  5. What are our FINAL IMPRESSIONS of this issue?

Asking these questions – and being able to come up with answers yourself – is what critical analysis is all about. Also, anything you take the time to figure out for yourself sticks in your brain. Reading someone else’s ideas just isn’t quite the same!

Open questions ask you to discuss the entire play – not the plot, but your experience of watching/studying the play.

  • Favourite / most dramatic scene.
  • Relevance to a modern audience.
  • Although Hamlet is a tragedy, it is a play with many memorable comic moments – discuss.
  • Hamlet is a dark, depressing and pessimistic play – discuss.

Style questions are quite difficult and pretty rare in the new course (so far) – they ask you to look at how the play is written.

  • Language & imagery.
  • Dramatic function of various characters (how they make the plot more compelling).

No matter how the question is phrased on the day, you must stay calm. Keep using the words from the question and synonyms.

Write down the 5 key Q’s – 1. WHO? 2. HOW/WHY? 3. CHANGE? 4. SCENES? 5. FINAL IMPRESSIONS?

You must quickly plan your 6 paragraphs.

As you are writing, if one paragraph gets too long, turn it into two, no big deal.

Beware of just starting to write and writing until the hour is up (writing whatever comes into your head without doing any planning). This stream of consciousness approach tends to lead to waffle, plot summary and lots of irrelevant information which has nothing to do with the question.

Keep the question in your mind at all times as you write. Remember you must demonstrate that the information you are including is relevant to the question being asked.

If any of the questions above freak you out why not try to figure out what you might discuss now, rather than on the day? You don’t have to write the full essay, you could just plan your 6 paragraphs and think about what quotes you might include.

Good luck!

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