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Having been brought up speaking English, most of our Second Level students should be well placed to successfully take the Higher Level Paper. There are a number of reasons why this does not happen as it should:
Our Grinds are aimed at rectifying these shortcomings and thereafter to practise our students in their newly developed skills.
BELOW: Find some examples of our work with students in aspects of Higher Level Literature
What is revealed in the poetry of Sylvia Plath is the vivid portrait of a tormented and anguished person (Mick Beirne)
Sylvia Plath suffers for her sanity like other sensitive artists who feared that they would in time be betrayed by what they loved. John Keats feared that he would die “before his pen had gleaned his teaming brain”; Sylvia Plath feared that her muse would fail her while she lived. Thus she refers to “total neutrality”, and this means an absence of inspiration to write. This produces a terrible anxiety as she awaits the next “miracle” and seeks “back talk from the sky”. Yet, as long as a black rook can inspire her on a rainy day, because of how the light is playing spasmodic tricks of radiance upon its feathers, the miracle is always about; though she may not have grasped this assurance. Her season of fatigue and her long wait are part of her own innate fear of ultimate failure: ironically, this might well have produced an earlier fatal sequel ─ were it not for the help of her fickle muse.
Within the “Bee Box” there is something suppressed; an awareness caused to become angry; something scary that nevertheless draws her towards it incessantly like a great magnet; some dark power that may be released with potential dreadful consequences. The subject matter is perhaps metaphorical: the torrent is within the confines of her own head as much as it is within the bee cage; the great magnet is her Muse and the darkness is what she has camouflaged until now ─ for the gentle hearted might not like it. So she can nurture these things for future release or let them decay. If she releases the power of her caged awareness it may cause unforeseen hurt. “I am no source of honey”, she says: so neither bees nor people may expect too much flower-like sweetness from her; thus neither can feel cheated by a new revelation. So then, she has power: the power to grant freedom to both the bees and to her own art-crazed thoughts ─ thus she is like God, where being sweet equals delivering some fulfilment. Tomorrow, she promises, she will deliver!
Perhaps Plath should be best seen as having been married to her muse to whom she bears a family of poems ─ which alone fulfil her intuition. In morning Song we see her innate fear of and alienation to human motherhood: her baby is “a fat golden watch”, and later its mouth is like that of a cat. Then, at best, it is the sound of the sea in its breathing: but the sea has as much potential to be dangerous as beautiful ─ for it may drown those that engage with it! She herself is a milch cow and the light of day swallows the dull stars. She and her baby will become as alien to one another as the passing cloud that condenses a pool of water and then loses its former shape. As a mother, Plath is full of insecurity so that her baby’s nakedness only bares her own inefficiencies for her new role.
The terrible truth within the theme of the poem “Child” is that, whereas the innocence and imagination of the child should be a source of emotional inspiration to the mother, it only reflects all the more on her emptiness and inability to relate to joy. Thus the little child ponders on the beauty of “The zoo of the new” Even words as well as shapes and colours bear it magic. In contrast its mother sees only “this dark Ceiling without a star”
The poem “Poppies” presents even a more gruesome affair; for the poet can not experience any emotion at all ─ not even pain. This presents a fearsome prospect that she would gladly suffer physical trauma rather than live within her current state of inertia: “If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!” The flickering of the poppies in the breeze only serves to exhaust her; but she is somewhat excited by the imagery of violence which she beholds in their colour:
“A mouth just blooded.
Little bloody skirts!”
She is close to breakdown now and simply wants to get out, she thinks: “If I could bleed or sleep”
The “Mirror” is no sweet god: but the woman who visits it daily wants it to produce miracles. However, it unapologetically tells the truth and does not requite her supplications when she comes to it for comfort: thus it is insensitive and mean, but faithful to fact. And that fact is that the lady grows steadily older and is not a “Snow white”. Then the mirror undergoes a terrible metamorphoses becoming a lake into which the woman has gone as a young girl, only to emerge as a self-scaring and terrible fish. Thus Plath illustrates the importunate nature of her gender: needing and not getting reassurance, losing beauty with inevitable age and ultimately frightened by a future of helpless decline. Such is also of course common to the male of our species: but Plath writes here only for her own.
Plath is an endearing poet, full of the wonder of nature’s mysteries, full of human fears of failure and decline, but lulling us with poetic beauty to enjoy her sorrow. She is the rare sensitive pheasant on the elm hill trailing its tail in the winter snow; she is the mad bee box full of energetic trouble; she is the black rook in rainy weather waiting for the random descent of light upon its dullness that will radiate its hidden beauty; she is the paradoxical morning song for her baby that is so much a mourning song for freedom; she is the “zoo of the new” in which her child can meditate wonder and so become wise ─ but she does not know it; she is the lady at the mirror of art drowning in her own dreams and discovering a nightmare; and she is unfortunately ann ultimately the bloody poppy that will produce its own dulling opiates to forever still her fear and pain and her irreplaceable poetry.
“EACH TEXT WE READ PRESENTS US WITH AN OUTLOOK ON LIFE THAT MAY BE BRIGHT OR DARK OR A COMBINATION Of BRIGHTNESS AND DARKNESS”
The general vision and viewpoint of a text expresses the author’s or director’s optimistic or pessimistic outlook on life. It also enables us to establish a greater understanding of the characters and allows us to empathise with them. The outlook can be either bright or dark, or indeed a combination of brightness and darkness and as we become more aware of this outlook as the plot develops, we can more effectively understand the situation of the protagonist within the narrative.
You’re not being asked to talk about how the culture can effect a character of the play, what you’re being asked to do is talk about how the author, playwright or director portrays the different elements of society.
USE THE LANGUAGE OF COMPARISON: “similarly”, “likewise”, “in contrast”, “unlike””as opposed to …..” etc.
• Does the main protagonist achieve success in that he/she achieves fulfilment.
• That person will inevitably meet challenging situations along the way of life: the question of character is determined by how he/she is prepared to deal with these problems.
• He/she may attempt to use a situation for immoral selfish reasons – thus defining this character as being essentially corrupt.
• Those who face their problems and do not allow others to determine their lives are said to give us a bright outlook on life; those who succumb totally to fate give us therefore the opposite -- a dark outlook on life.
• Money, greed and selfish ambition are often cited as factors which corrupt the human vision and lead to a negative attitude to human principles and priorities.
• Has he/she learnt anything from life?
YEATS IS A POET CONCERNED WITH CHANGE!
When studying the poetry of W.B. Yeats, we admire the great variety of themes with which he deals; likewise, we are impressed by how his interests and works evolved and changed over time. He is wont to apprehend and celebrate different forms of human emotion and habit; yet he does not present a constant positive reaction to perceived or anticipated moods of change -- outside of his own.
In his poem on The Wild Swans At Coole, he complements the constancy in the cold hearts of these birds as compared to fickle and faltering human love that changes, and withers with time:
“Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.”
He has become disenchanted with the drift into materialism of the Irish Catholic Middle Class. He feels that the great romanticism that had once inspired the Fenian movement had been reneged on and dishonoured by the new generation. This is a change which he castigates in sardonic words and tone:
“What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
Consequently, he expects nothing from these middle class poets and writers with whom he meets regularly and whose patriotic agenda he dismisses as merely being the gestures of clowns and posers on a forlorn stage:
“ I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn: “
Thus when these clowns transform into leaders of insurrection the unheralded change overwhelms him so much that he can not interpret it plainly; thus he is forced to employ an oxymoron to symbolise its elusive meaning:
“A Terrible Beauty Is Born”
Yet, ironically, despite the sentiments of the September 1913 poem; and despite the reputation of this Easter 1916 poem as a having been composed as a salute to the Irish freedom fighters, Yeats is not sure if their sacrifice was necessary – because the British Parliament had already passed the Home Rule Bill. Moreover, he feels that these patriots had become fanatic, obstinate, and un-receptive to the rational political environment then prevailing within the country.
“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.”
Yet he – like others – has been touched by the romantic bravery of those who have died. He commits their names to the eternity of poetic art, in which they will be forever mythologised like Tone and Emmet. Even those whom he did not relish in life will have their blemishes metamorphosed to glory by the nobility of their deeds and death.
“This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born “
Therefore, the poet is perplexed in his reaction: being both thrilled by amazement at these heroics, and frightened for his class by the prospect of prolonged revolution:
“Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?”
When the Treaty has been signed things young and beautiful fall apart and Civil War commences with raw cruelty; he knows then that the patriots have dreamed in vain.
He wishes that political structures could be loose – like the masonry on the walls of his home, and that human society could be as altruistic as the bees and stares that can share each other’s habitats without rancour or revenge:
“The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare. “
He has become disenchanted with these new developments in his Nation’s affairs. The Stare’s Nest by My Window is a retreat to Utopia -- – as he had done in his younger days when, like the Prodigal Son, he had vowed to go back to where his soul belonged:
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
However, a poet does not have to remain confined by consistency of thought over a period of time. Thus Yeats subsequently rejects the search for perfection in nature – feeling that its values are limited to themes of reproduction and mortality:
“Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. “
The human being must inevitably grow old and loose the attractive beauty of youth; consequently, he will become an apprentice to death with all the agues of age upon his features it he does not cultivate the soul: and that is best done by art:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
and that spiritual excellence is best achieved by art:
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
Thus, he begins to undergo a metamorphoses -- indulging in metaphysical thought through which he concludes that only by art alone can human virtue achieve perfection and eternal endurance.
“Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling “
Even if by this stage our hero has been eating more than honey and beans,
can we yet credit a literal interpretation of his wish to become transformed into a golden bird :
“set upon a golden bough to sing
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
Perhaps it would be better to interpret this as an allegoric representation of the poet’s wish to achieve permanence through the golden art of lyrical and imaginative verse – which he knows best..
On the other hand what appears consistent in Yeats’ work is his preoccupati0n with a perceived relationship between class sophistication and appreciation of art. It is not for the sake of enhanced imagery alone that he includes the company of Lords, Ladies and an Emperor in the artist’s paradise. However, he could nevertheless, write an anthem for the poor peasant who had to leave the land of his birth, and who yearned to return there some day; thus, it is fitting to conclude with the lines for which he is still remembered most by the ordinary people of Ireland:
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
“CLAUDIUS CAN BE SEEN AS BOTH A HEARTLESS VILLAIN AND A CHARACTER WITH SOME REDEEMING QUALITIES!”
Claudius can be seen as both a heartless villain and a gifted person of vague compromised virtue - possessing some positive qualities. Although he is a very devious and manipulative character and has committed the crimes of fratricide and regicide, he displays other traits – some of which could be considered partly redeeming in political terms; Therefore, those who are more interested in using practical matters of the State as the criteria for analysis may chose to argue his merits: that he is efficient, capable and decisive in dealing with conflict using subtle diplomatic skills. Thus they will contend that he successfully unites the nation in the dangerous aftermath of regicide; that - with clear judgement and incisiveness - he quickly comes to terms with young Fortinbras, and achieves an easy settlement of the Norwegian business; and ndeed they may contend that were it not for the way in which he has usurped the Crown, he might with time and practice have become a good king.
Could this otherwise supposed villain have been in reality some sort of “tragic hero “ who has great potential combined with the moral weaknesses of lust and ambition; one who has traded everything for carnal and material gain? He is not a common sociopath; his plight in prayer reveals a conscience-stricken and rather fearful man who is aware of the price of his ill-gotten power - for which just retribution from God must be expected. So he murmurs in his prayers as Hamlet contemplates assassination:
“ Forgive me my foul murder?
That cannot be, since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.”
The effect of this revelation of a hidden Claudius as a man with a tormented conscience may be shocking in that it does not fit in to the stereotype of the all-evil villain; it may also be contrasted with the cold indifference of our hero Hamlet in the aftermath of his rash murder of Polonius. Hamlet’s attitude to murder only differs from that of his uncle in that he wants the deed to be dramatic! Life was cheap in feudal times: the gravedigger has apparently long come to terms with the casual role of the arbiter death; the audience will have to do so by the end of the drama!
As one who has usurped power, Claudius is intent on political survival and is more aware of the dangers than his predecessor – and he knows by instinct from where it is likely to come; thus, he is obsessed with the threat that Hamlet poses:
“For like the hectic in my blood he rages.”
And so he organises to have Hamlet executed in England – reducing the once noble Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the role of obsequious messenger boys who will bear orders for their old friend’s assassination:
“letters conjuring to that effect,
The present death of Hamlet”
Claudius is all about survival of the fittest, and to that end he will sacrifice all others; however he stumbles too often into the traps of fate which are destined for his downfall. Had he waited, he might well have become king: for the young Hamlet is not made of the stuff of Statesmen. Had he not allowed his lust to govern his head, he would not have gone overtly to Gertrude’s bed, thus incensing her self-righteous son into the role of a jealous adversary. Had he allowed Hamlet to return to to Wittenberg to pursue his artistic endeavours, the young Prince’s energy could have been otherwise engaged than having become involved in mischief and precarious conspiracy. Were that to have happened, the ghost would not have disturbed the dark secrets of the Court of Ellsinore, Polonius would not have been slain, Ophelia would not have grown crazy with sorrow and Laertes would not have been sent seeking revenge. Therefore we can say that ambition, lust and anxiety were ultimately the fatal pathways to mass murder, chaos and surrender of the Crown of State to outside interests.
Claudius is full of deception and intrigue. He has been called a “slimy beast” by one critic and several nastier names by Hamlet himself: “incestuous, adulterous, a smiling damned villain.” He is all of these; yet he is more than such simple definitions can explain. Among other things Claudius possesses subtle diplomatic skills. These are clearly manifested when he is confronted by the armed Laertes: here he displays a considerable coolness in the face of incipient danger – converting a lethal enemy into a fellow conspirator in his latest project for the extermination of his nemesis Hamlet. The now confident Claudius tells Laertes that:
“Revenge should have no bounds.” He can accommodate his carnal relationship with Gertrude and an irreconcilable conflict with Hamlet. Yet in the end he is able to watch his desired one drinking poison without saying the words that could have saved her life – for he must pursue the main plot involving her son’s impending death
Ultimately he is the consummate psychopath in its truest sense – believing that his great survival project trumps all moral and mundane priorities. As a representation of this breed of humanity his portrayal by Shakespeare is entirely convincing. That such a person could be secretly troubled by conscience is what makes Claudius fascinating to those who think only in absolute terms of good and evil and have not heard of, or have come to dismiss the old Christian ethos of belief in a Divine prerogative for forgiveness.