June 10, 2019

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This poem was a private diary entry, and so perhaps only ever intended for Byron to explore his own private thoughts and inner psychology. However, as he was about to go into battle and expected to die and attain the status of a hero, it could also be said that he intended the poem to be found and published after his death.

This analysis is tailored towards IGCSE, GCSE, and A-Level students, but it’s useful for anyone studying the poem at any level (including the CIE / Cambridge, WJEC / Eduqas, Edexcel, OCR, and CCEA exam boards).


Thanks for reading! If you find this page useful, you can take a look at our full courses here:

CIE Poetry A Level: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/p/cie-a-level-poetry-anthology

Link to all our English courses: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/courses


THE POEM

On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

January 22nd, 1824 Missolonghi (Greece)

’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move:

Yet though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love!

.

My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;

The worm — the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

.

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze

A funeral pile.

.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain

And power of Love I cannot share,

But wear the chain.

.

But ’tis not thus — and ’tis not here

Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now,

Where Glory decks the hero’s bier,

Or binds his brow.

.

The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,

Glory and Greece around us see!

The Spartan borne upon his shield

Was not more free.

.

Awake (not Greece — she is awake!)

Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake

And then strike home!

.

Tread those reviving passions down

Unworthy Manhood — unto thee

Indifferent should the smile or frown

Of beauty be.

.

If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live?

The land of honourable Death

Is here: — up to the Field, and give

Away thy breath!

.

Seek out — less often sought than found —

A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy Ground,

And take thy rest.

Lord Byron


VOCABULARY

’Tis — it is (colloquial, conversational)

Unmoved — not bothered, not emotionally disturbed

Hath — has

Ceased to move — been unable to affect / stopped affecting

Yet — but

Beloved — loved by someone

Canker — rot, disease

Bosom — chest, breast

Lone — alone, lonely

Isle — island

Kindled — set alight and encouraged to burn, as in with firewood

Funeral pile — a pile of wood that a corpse is burned on top of

Exalted — in a high position, high status, or extreme happiness

Thus — this way

Bier — a frame that coffins or corpses are placed on

Binds — wraps up tightly

Tread down — step heavily upon

Manhood — masculinity, the condition of being a man

Thou regret’st — you regret

Honourable — bringing or deserving honour

Unto thee — to you

Indifferent — not affected, not bothered

STORY/SUMMARY

The speaker says that it’s time for his heart to stop being so emotional since it has failed to affect the hearts of others (either through love or by being inspirational). (Stanza 2) His days are in the season of Autumn, where the vibrancy of life is fading. He has lost the flowers and fruits of love, and now he only has the worm and rot to look forward to — images of death and decay. (Stanza 3) The fire that takes hold of his chest is lonely as if it were an isolated volcano on an island. No one goes to set light to a torch there, it is like a funeral pile that will burn only to destroy his own body. (Stanza 4) He feels a range of extreme emotions — hope, fear, jealousy that springs from caring, uplifting pain, powerful Love that he cannot share with anyone, but which he is bound by nonetheless. (Stanza 5) But it is not the right time for these kinds of thoughts to disturb the speaker’s soul, when Glory is going to be covering his coffin frame and across his forehead. (Stanza 6) The speaker reminds himself that he is in Greece, where great wars took place by heroes in ancient times — Spartans killed in battle who were brought back home on shields were as free as he is now because they died in glory. (Stanza 7) He commands his spirit to wake up, noting that Greece is already awake. He tells himself to think of his ancestors, who are Ancient Greek if you go back to Classical times — to the ‘parent lake’ of his bloodline, he asks it to be emotionally moved by this thought. (Stanza 8) He commands his spirit to stamp down upon the earlier intense emotions that he felt, otherwise his masculinity (‘manhood’) is not worthy of glory or respect — he should remain unbothered by the smiles and frowns of beauty. (Stanza 9) He asks himself: “If you regret your youth, why continue living?” The land of Death (war) stretches before him, he should step up to battle and willingly give his life. (Stanza 10) He tells his soul to look for a soldier’s grave — this is something more often found than actively looked for because soldiers usually don’t go into battle expecting or wishing to die. In the speaker’s case, he is happy to die and will choose his resting spot on the ground during the battle.

SPEAKER/VOICE

This is a personal poem, written by Byron in his journal in Missolonghi, Greece, just before he was about to lead a battle for Greek independence against the Ottomans (Turkish). It is likely intended only for himself, or perhaps close friends to read after his anticipated death. The speaker is therefore Byron himself, who explores a complex range of feelings before steeling himself and mentally preparing to die in battle. He resolves that he has not found love or happiness in life, so to die in battle may give a noble end to his wasted youth. There is a mixture of heroism and depression in his thoughts, and so the poem oscillates between a courageous and disconsolate tone, giving a disconcerting and uneasy feeling to the lines.

LANGUAGE

Synecdoche — ‘this heart should be unmoved’ — the poem opens with an image of the heart, which stands as a placeholder to represent Byron’s emotions and feelings.

Extended metaphor — ‘My days are in the yellow leaf; / The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; / The worm — the canker, and the grief/ Are mine alone!’ — the second stanza uses an extended metaphor, Byron visualizes his life as passing through seasons, as nature does, concluding that he is in ‘the yellow leaf’ at thirty-six years old — he is passing into the autumn of his life, past the times of Summer where Love was plenty. He only has the tripartite structure of ‘The worm- the canker, and the grief’ to look forward to, images of decay and misery.

Simile — ‘lone as some Volcanic isle’ — the ‘fire’ in the speaker’s heart is lonely, Byron uses both a metaphor and a simile here to demonstrate the idea that his emotions are passionate but they have nowhere to go, no outlet to pour into.

Listing- ‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care / The exalted portion of the pain/ and power of Love I cannot share’ — the poet uses a list of abstract nouns to exemplify the extreme range of positive and negative emotions he is feeling, including the oxymoron ‘jealous care’, which emphasizes how some of these emotions are contradictory. There is also a kind of truth in the fact that caring for someone or something can turn into jealousy when the situation is not reciprocated and the love is unreturned. The phrase ‘exalted portion of the pain’ is also contradictory, as the adjective ‘exalted’ can refer both to extreme happiness, or to a person in a high position. The double nature of this word is likely used deliberately, to suggest that Byron partly enjoys the state of sadness he’s in, as if it is comforting or comfortable to him, and it also implies that he idolizes his pain, placing it on a pedestal and allowing it to frequently consume his thoughts and dictate his actions.

Personification — certain abstract nouns are personified, such as ‘Love’ and ‘Glory’, to imply that they are high states of being to which we should always aspire. This is also a technique that is commonly used in Classical Greek and Roman literature, and as Byron is in Greece and feels indebted to Greek culture and history, it is fitting for him to use the same technique in his writing.

Tripartite structure — ‘The Sword, the Banner and the Field’ — Byron appears to be in front of a battlefield, envisioning the battle that is about to take place there — he perhaps feels as though he will be a significant figure in history by partaking in this battle. The tripartite structure is a rhetorical device that almost acts persuasively on himself as if he is trying to rouse himself from a state of introspection and depression into action and confidence.

Rhetorical question — ‘If thou regret’ st thy youth, why live?’ the question furthers the persuasive intent of the poem, using logic to build an argument against the idea of continuing to be miserable and in decline, Byron resolves that it is better to die for a noble cause than to continue living in a state of despair; this seems to have a positively persuasive effect on his mind and encourages him to seek Glory in death if in life he is unable to find Love.

STRUCTURE / FORM

Subtitle — January 22nd, 1824 Missolonghi (Greece) — the subtitle of the poem gives it a documentary-style, historical and monumental feeling, as if the poem marks a significant turning point in Byron’s life, and perhaps history — as he was about to go to war with the Turkish Empire and fight for Greek independence. It also implies the epistolary form of the poem — the fact that it was a private journal entry, intended for Byron to express his thoughts and explore his own psyche, rather than to be read publicly by others. Although, on the other hand, Byron did know that he was famous and that there was a chance his private thoughts would have been published after his death, so he may also have been writing the poem as a preparation for those the public to commemorate him heroically after his death in battle.

Elegy — If we believe that Byron intended the poem to be found and published posthumously (after his death), then it could also be considered a kind of elegiac poem, one intended to commemorate the dead — curiously this would also make it Byron’s own elegy to himself, as elegies are typically written about other people. Tragically, Byron caught a fever and died before ever reaching battle, and so his death was not the one which he envisioned for himself — although he is still revered today as a hero in Greece, with a part of Athens being named after him (Vyronas).

ABAB rhyme scheme — the alternate rhyme of the poem perhaps implies an oscillation between the two conflicted states of Byron’s mind — he is torn between succumbing to his intense emotions and wallowing in a state of depression as he tries to carry on with his life, or actively seeking out death in battle and being remembered as a hero.

Iambic tetrameter / iambic dimeter — the first three lines of each stanza use iambic tetrameter — four feet per line, arranged in unstressed-stressed syllables. They get shorter towards the end of each stanza, ending in dimeter — two feet per line. This has the effect of each stanza feeling as though it’s cut short — perhaps to anticipate Byron’s life being cut short, or else his attempt to stop his intense emotions from taking over his mind by regaining some control over his thoughts. Furthermore, the use of half-rhyme indicates death/decay, for instance ‘move’ and ‘Love’, or ‘gone’ and ‘alone’ look the same visually, but phonetically have slight differences in pronunciation.

Volta — ‘But ’tis not thus’ — the stanza beginning with these lines signifies a volta — a turning point in the tone of the poem; Byron’s thoughts turn from being self-destructively consumed by conflicting emotions into projecting outwards, convincing himself that he can use his feelings to fight for Glory and regain his honor and nobility. The use of italicizations — thus, here, now — is also highly emphatic, they provide stress or emphasis on time and place, helping to enhance the argument that it is neither the time nor place to wallow in self-pity, as it is the time for action.

Parenthesis — ‘Awake(not Greece — she is awake)’ — the use of parenthesis here provides a comical interlude to a serious poem about life, death, and glory. Byron seems aware that the subject of his previous stanza was ‘Greece’ itself, and so the imperative verb ‘Awake’ reads at first as though it still refers to Greece. He offers the correction ‘Awake, my soul’ in the second line, which also serves as anaphora — a repetition of the word ‘Awake’ at the beginning of the line. This suggests a self-critical nature and that Byron is playfully as well as painfully aware of his shortcomings, as he is criticizing himself for unclear writing even as he writes the poem.

CONTEXT

This was the final entry in Byron’s journal before he died (aged 36, which for the time was middle-aged for most people). He was in Missolonghi, Greece, waiting to receive battle orders for an attack that he had planned against the Ottoman army — at the time, Greek was under Turkish occupation, and so Byron was fighting for Greek independence and saw himself as an honorable savior of the Greek people. He was not directly Greek himself but trained extensively and very much influenced by Classical Greek literature and history, and so (as he acknowledges in his poem) he felt a kinship and solidarity with the people of Greece, some of whom returned his feelings of kinship and some who sought to exploit his wealth and generosity. Byron had exiled himself from England at this point in his life due to several scandals and figures in society who sought to ruin his name, and so he settled for a time in Greece and became involved in the politics there. He sold some of his property and amassed debts in order to fund the political campaign he orchestrated against the Ottomans. Though tragically Byron died of a fever before entering battle, the Greeks were successful in their war of Independence and to this day acknowledge Byron’s contribution to their successful campaign, naming a part of Athens ‘Vyronas’ in his honor.

Spartan borne upon his shield — dead Spartan soldiers were carried back home on their shields as a sign of honor; it was common knowledge in Ancient Greece that Spartans (who had a warrior culture) never gave up their shields — they either returned to Sparta carrying their shields or if they died the other soldiers carried them back to Sparta on their shields as a sign of respect and honor.

Byronic hero — The concept of a ‘Byronic hero’ exists in literature and stories even today, and it stems from Byron and his crazy antics. A conflicted figure who once famously stated ‘I am such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me’. The antithetical extremes of good and evil, darkness and light were inherent in Byron’s nature, and they can be seen in this poem as motivating factors behind his actions and life decisions. He is torn between the ‘exalted’ pleasures and pains that the experiences in life, and the idea that in death he could give up his life for a cause greater than himself. He seems to view the decision as partially altruistic — for the greater good of the Greek people — and partially restorative — to regain his own honour after becoming infamous in England and self-imposing an exile.

The poem also explores the Classical Greek notions of heroism, most notably psuche — the Greek concept of the soul or ‘spirit’, and kleos — the type of fame and glory attained after dying on a battlefield.

ATTITUDES

It is a kind of weakness to be ruled by our emotions — Throughout the poem, there is a battle between the heart — emotions — and the mind — logic/reason and the poem progresses structurally from emotional outbursts to calm, logical and determined thinking. It also psychologically shifts from the internal to the external, from introspection and passivity to action.

Death can restore nobility that a person has lost in life — As mentioned in the context, the concept of kleos seems central to the poem — Byron feels that it is not too late to regain his honor and to be remembered as a positive figure in history, rather than a ruined and villainous one. At the time he had been involved in various scandals in England and was very unfavorably portrayed in the public eye (having been positively famous previously, he found this hard to take), he left England never to return alive and with this transition he also seems to have felt he could still gain the positive glory and fame that he always sought, though this time it would require a sacrifice of his own life in order to do so.

The stages of life are like seasons — it is common in the literature to portray a person’s life as occurring in seasons or various natural stages — spring is often childhood and early adulthood, summer is the prime of a person’s life, autumn a time for calming down and reflecting — perhaps teaching or passing on knowledge, and wintertime for rest, enjoyment and peace. Byron feels that he is past his prime, he is ‘in the yellow leaf’ stage of his life, but having not settled down or married (although he did have several children with different women and also adopted a Muslim girl whose parents had been killed in war), he is not at the typical point of an ‘autumn’ stage, so he resolves to choose a different ending for himself, as he chose an alternative and unusual path in life too.

All Western culture has its roots in Ancient Greek and Roman traditions — Byron pays hommage to Greek literature and history that he was educated in by living in Greece and fighting for the independence of modern Greek people from the Ottoman empire. He calls this the ‘parent lake’ of his bloodline, acknowledging that all Western culture in a sense comes from this Greek origin, as Athens was the creator of democracy on which modern politics and social structures are founded.

THEMES

  • Emotion vs Logic
  • Love
  • Beauty
  • Death
  • Aging
  • Youth vs Maturity
  • Glory
  • Heroism
  • War
  • Western History
  • Nobility
  • Sacrifice
  • Fame


Thanks for reading! If you find this page useful, you can take a look at our full courses here:

CIE Poetry A Level: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/p/cie-a-level-poetry-anthology

Link to all our English courses: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/courses

In essay writing for English, English Literature, and a lot of other humanities subjects (History, Classics, Sociology, Philosophy, Politics, etc) it is very important to be able to write a clear, precise paragraph that expresses your thoughts and analysis in detail. In order to do this, most schools and colleges teach something called a ‘PEE’ paragraph structure. Below, you’ll find a breakdown of the different types of ‘PEE’ paragraphs that you can do — including some basic and some more advanced examples.


This document is useful for anyone studying at school, high school, college, or university level, particularly on the following exam boards: AQA, OCR, Edexcel, WJEC / Eduqas, CIE / Cambridge, CCEA.

Thanks for reading! If you find this page helpful you can take a look at our full essay writing course here: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/p/basic-essay-writing


*** Bear in mind that you only use this structure for the middle paragraphs of your essay. Don’t use it in the introduction or conclusion!

PEE Structure (Beginner level)

Point — your ‘topic sentence’ of the paragraph. This should set the topic — explain an idea or opinion that you want to explore further. Your topic should not just describe the story, it needs to be a personal opinion or idea that deals with one aspect of the essay question.

Evidence — this is a quotation, several short quotations, or a reference that backs up your point. You are giving evidence to prove that your idea/opinion that was already stated in the first sentence of the paragraph is right. The evidence should be as clear and concise as possible, and it should perfectly illustrate your point.

Explanation — this is the analysis part of your paragraph. It shouldn’t just be one sentence; be sure to make it as long as possible — at least 2–3 sentences beyond your point and evidence. This bit is where you explain how and why your evidence proves your point. Don’t just describe the evidence, go deeper into exactly what it implies or suggests about the point and question. You can use techniques and zooming in on a specific word or phrase from the evidence to boost your grade.

Once you’ve mastered a PEE paragraph, there are ways to extend it further and make it more personal, developed, and sophisticated. If you’re aiming for around a C grade at GCSE / High School level then you only need to go as far as the PEE paragraph. For anything higher than that, you should learn these two examples below:

PETAL Structure (Intermediate level)

Point — your ‘topic sentence’ of the paragraph. This should set the topic — explain an idea or opinion that you want to explore further. Your topic should not just describe the story, it needs to be a personal opinion or idea that deals with one aspect of the essay question.

Evidence — this is a quotation, several short quotations, or a reference that backs up your point. You are giving evidence to prove that your idea/opinion that was already stated in the first sentence of the paragraph is right. The evidence should be as clear and concise as possible, and it should perfectly illustrate your point. Several short quotations grouped together to prove the same point is also called ‘synthesized quotations’, students that know how to do this usually are working at a higher level — as examiners, we look out for this as one indication of someone that is deserving of a B-A* grade.

Technique — you should always add in a technique whenever you quote or reference something. The best techniques to use are poetic devices (metaphor, simile, alliteration, etc) or rhetorical devices (repetition, rhetorical question, emotive language, etc). If you can’t think of a poetic or rhetorical technique you can also use grammatical devices (noun, verb, adjective, etc). Several techniques at once can also be more effective than just finding one and then moving on quickly. To learn more about techniques, take our ‘Basic Language Devices’ course here: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/p/basic-language-devices

Analysis — this is the same as ‘explanation’. Talk about how and why your quotation or reference proves the point of the paragraph, and how all of that answers the question. Don’t retell the story or describe what happens, you don’t get many marks for doing that in an essay. Instead of just finding the techniques and moving on, you also want to analyze them — why did they choose to use repetition, for example? Think about the detailed and specific effects of the evidence and how that links back both to the writer themselves and the question you’re trying to answer. To get extra marks, zoom in to some of your evidence and find more techniques/analysis there to go even deeper into the question. The more analysis you have, the higher your grade tends to be.

Link — finally, link back to the thesis that you wrote in the intro; the thesis is a one-sentence answer to the question that summarises your main opinion on the question and the writer’s purpose. Once you’ve set a thesis, you need to keep going back to it throughout the essay. Ideally, everything you write after the intro should just be a deeper way to prove your thesis is correct.

PEEDL Structure (Advanced level)

Point — your ‘topic sentence’ of the paragraph. This should set the topic — explain an idea or opinion that you want to explore further. Your topic should not just describe the story, it needs to be a personal opinion or idea that deals with one aspect of the essay question.

Evidence — this is a quotation, several short quotations, or a reference that backs up your point. You are giving evidence to prove that your idea/opinion that was already stated in the first sentence of the paragraph is right. The evidence should be as clear and concise as possible, and it should perfectly illustrate your point. Several short quotations grouped together to prove the same point is also called ‘synthesized quotations’, students that know how to do this usually are working at a higher level — as examiners, we look out for this as one indication of someone that is deserving of a B-A* grade.

Explanation — this is the same as ‘analysis’. Talk about how and why your quotation or reference proves the point of the paragraph, and how all of that answers the question. Don’t retell the story or describe what happens, you don’t get many marks for doing that in an essay. Instead of just finding the techniques and moving on, you also want to analyze them — why did they choose to use repetition, for example? Think about the detailed and specific effects of the evidence and how that links back both to the writer themselves and the question you’re trying to answer. To get extra marks, zoom in to some of your evidence and find more techniques/analysis there to go even deeper into the question. The more analysis you have, the higher your grade tends to be.

Development — this is a crucial aspect of your paragraph for anyone studying at a higher level or aiming for a top grade. You need to develop and expand what you’re talking about so that it feels like it’s not just your own ideas, but it’s actually informed by your wider reading and knowledge of the text. There are several ways to develop: go deeper into the context of the text and use that to analyse (explain how / why) the question and back up your point; go deeper into the themes and messages behind the story — explain what the writer’s main aims were and how these link to the question, how were they trying to persuade us to think or feel about an important theme? What is their overall intention in terms of how they aim to influence their audience?; explore alternative interpretations (at a high level this includes critics’ quotes) — how might a modern audience interpret an older story differently from the original audience? If someone is religious or atheist, what would their reaction be to the messages of the story? Understand different perspectives and also have a sense of your own personal opinion and why you think that you’re correct.

Link — finally, link back to the thesis that you wrote in the intro; the thesis is a one-sentence answer to the question that summarises your main opinion on the question and the writer’s purpose. Once you’ve set a thesis, you need to keep going back to it throughout the essay. Ideally, everything you write after the intro should just be a deeper way to prove your thesis is correct.

Thanks for reading! If you find this page helpful you can take a look at our full essay writing course here: https://scrbbly.teachable.com/p/basic-essay-writing

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Here is a detailed analysis of Derek Walcott’s poem “Forest of Europe”.

The poem explores the experience of exile and alienation with particular reference to poets across cultures. The poets are separated from their birthplaces, and when they are exiled, they are not given human treat meant by the diasporas societies. So both the places, for the revolutionary poets, are desolated. “Forest of Europe” is written by Derek Walcott for his friend Joseph Brodsky.

This poem is tailored towards students taking the CIE / Cambridge A-Level syllabus but will be useful for anyone who’s working on understanding the poem at any level.
It is great for revision, missed lessons, boosting analytical / research skills, and developing students’ confidence in Walcott’s poetry at a higher level.


Thanks for reading! If you find this analysis useful, take a look at our full Derek Walcott course here.


Forest of Europe

“The last leaves fell like notes from a piano

and left their ovals echoing in the ear;

with gawky music stands, the winter forest

looks like an empty orchestra, its lines

ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow….”

Derek Walcott

VOCABULARY

Ovals – slightly squashed circular shapes. 

Gawky – awkward looking and nervous.

Manuscripts – handwritten documents.

Inlaid copper laurel of oak – the few last leaves of an oak tree, that look as though they are made out of inlaid copper rather than natural material as they have turned brown and are about to drop off for the winter. 

Mandelstam – Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet (see the context for more info).

Ruble – the currency of Russia. 

Neva – a river in Northwest Russia (see the context for more info). 

Gutturals – harsh sounds made from the throat.

Oklahoma – a state in the Southern US. 

Gulag Archipelago – a non-fiction text by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about life in the Gulag, Soviet forced labor camps that were set up for prison inmates (see the context for more info).

Runnels – small gutters made by the flow of water, usually rainwater.

Herdsman – a shepherd, someone who rears herds of animals. 

Stubbled – making short and stiff shapes, as in stubbled hair growth that occurs as a man grows a beard.

Writer’s Congress – a meeting of Soviet writers and intellectuals that occurred in August 1934.

Cossacks – people from the East Slavic region, primarily Russians and Ukrainians (see the context for more info).

Choctaw – a Native American people who live in the Southern US region. 

Treaties – political documents that are drawn up and signed by states or countries in order to make agreements over certain socio-political matters. 

Brazen – brave, fearless, reckless. 

Icons – a picture or representation of a spiritual person, such as a religious leader or saint.

Floes – floating sheets of ice.

Freight yards – a space on a railway line that is designed for loading and unloading cargo from freight trains.

Consonants – non-vowel letters (everything except ‘a, e, i, o, u’).

Forlorn – sad, lonely, abandoned.

Prairie – low, flat-lying grassland. 

Desolate – abandoned and empty, a bleak and barren place. 

Parapets – protective walls or railings such as those found on the edges of a castle – used either for military defense or to protect people from falling.

To mint a sovereign – ‘to mint’ means to make coins by imprinting them, a sovereign is an old fashioned type of coin made out of solid gold.

Hudson’s silhouettes – the shadows of the Hudson River, a large river that flows through the Eastern US states, from Vermont to New York. 

Tributary – a small river that flows into a larger river or lake.

Emigrants – people who leave their native country to live elsewhere. 

Exile – being cast out from a place and not allowed to return.

Classless – not having a specific class (e.g. working, middle or upper class).

Threshing harvesters – farming machines which separate. 

Quivering – trembling.

Sunstroke – a sickness contracted from being in the sun too long.

Corruptible – able to be corrupted / manipulated / spoiled. 

Worth its salt – an expression meaning ‘good at the job’.

Condensation – when water vapour turns back into the water on a surface. 

Borealis – the ‘northern lights’, an aurora of light that emerges over the northern hemisphere.

Ague – illness / shivering fever.

Ruble – a Russian form of currency Mastodons – extinct elephant-like creatures, woolly mammoths are part of the mastodon group of animals.

STORY/SUMMARY 

Stanza 1: At the end of Autumn, the final leaves fell off the trees in oval shapes, like notes from a piano. The bare winter trees looked like an empty orchestra full of abandoned music stands, the leaf-littered snow beneath them resembled a document with scattered notes and lines. 

Stanza 2: There is an oak tree with a few coppery leaves still clinging to its branches, I can see it shining through a window framed with brown bricks above your head – it shines as brightly as whisky. You recite the poetry of Mandelstam in wintry breath, which uncoils like cigarette smoke as it makes vapour in the air. 

Stanza 3: You recite Mandelstam’s line of poetry: ‘The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva.’ You speak as an exile, and your sounds crackle like decaying leaves as you speak. This line from Mandelstam circles with light in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma (far from the country in which it was created). 

Stanza 4: There is a Gulag Archipelago (floating islands of imprisoned Russians) under the ice of Oklahoma, where the salt mineral spring of the Trail of Tears runs through the plains, which are hard and open like a shepherd’s face, cracked with the sun and stubbled with unshaven snow. 

Stanza 5: Starting with whispers from the Soviet Writers’ Congress, the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse of a Native American Choctaw who died from exhaustion, until it is a blizzard of treaties and white papers – the issue becomes more social and universal and it becomes difficult to see the individual humans who were affected because of an increasing focus on the cause. 

Stanza 6: Every spring the branches sprout new leaves, like libraries with newly published books, until they fall and become recycled – paper to snow – but one mind continues suffering even at zero degrees temperatures, it lasts like the oak tree with a few bold leaves still clinging to it. 

Stanza 7: As the train passed through the tortured icons of the forest, the ice sheets clanging like freight yards, the spires of frozen tears, stations with steam trains, he managed to capture all of this in a single winter’s breath of words, and his freezing consonants turned to stone – they became permanent and everlasting. 

Stanza 8: His inspiration for poetry was found in lonely train stations, under clouds that were as large as Asia, districts in Russia that were so large they would be able to swallow Oklahoma as if it was a grape, not the tree-shaded prairies of Oklahoma but space so desolate that it mocked the idea of arriving at a destination. 

Stanza 9: Who is that dark child standing on the boundaries of Europe, watching the evening river create gold coins stamped with power, not with poets, the Thames and Neva rivers rustling like banknotes then, black on gold, the silhouettes of the Hudson River in America. 

Stanza 10: A tributary of immigrants flows from the frozen Neva to the Hudson, under airports and stations, emigrants for whom exile has wiped away their class like the common cold, citizens of a language that is now yours 

Stanza 11: Every February, every ‘last autumn’ you write your poetry far away from the rural fields of Russia, which fold wheat like a girl plaiting her hair, far from Russia’s canals that quiver in the sun, you are a man living with English in one room. 

Stanza 12: The tourist islands of my South are prisons too, they are corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing poetry – what is poetry, if it is worth the effort, except a phrase that men can pass from the hand to the mouth? 

Stanza 13: Poetry is passed from hand to mouth, across the centuries, the bread that lasts when old political and social systems have decayed, when, in his forest of barbed wire branches, a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase that has music which will last longer than the leaves. 

Stanza 14: This prisoner’s condensation is the marble sweat of angel’s foreheads, which will never dry until the peacock lights of the Aurora Borealis that fan out from LA to Archangel shut down, and until memory needs nothing to repeat. 

Stanza 15: Osip Mandelstam was frightened and starved, but he shook with a divine sickness, every metaphor that he wrote made him shudder with illness, each vowel sound was heavier than the stones they set on the boundaries of edges of countries or territories, as he wrote the line ‘to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,’

Stanza 16: But now the fever of poetry is a fire, and the glow from it warm our hands, Joseph, as we sit in this wintry cave of a brown cottage, grunting in harsh sounds like apes, while in the snowdrifts outside giant mammoths are forcing their systems through banks of snow. 

SPEAKER/VOICE 

The speaker is Walcott himself, and he speaks to an addressee, ‘Joseph’, whose name is only mentioned in the final stanza of the poem. Joseph seems to be a close friend, as the pair find themselves isolated in a wintry collate in Oklahoma, sitting and reading poetry together. The subject varies from the personal to the political, going back and forth from individuals who achieved greatness to vast sociopolitical entities such as governments who are almost impossible to fight against. Nonetheless, it centers around the poet Osip Mandelstam and the everlasting power of his poetry. 

LANGUAGE 

Synesthetic imagery – ‘The last leaves fell like notes from a piano / and left their ovals echoing in the ear;’ – Walcott blends visual and auditory imagery, conflating the change of the seasons with a transition in a musical symphony to create a rich and diverse sense of setting at the beginning of the poem. 

The extended metaphor of snow –  the snow is a consistent motif that repeats in the imagery of the poem, beginning with the sibilant line ‘scattered manuscripts of snow’ – the sibilant ‘s’ and plosive ‘t’ sounds in this image recall the motion of scattering or littering, as the letters fall erratically in the line just as leaves fall randomly onto the snow in Winter. Later, ‘the snow circles…til it is a blizzard of treaties and white papers / as we lose sight of the single human through the cause’. It becomes a metaphor for blankness, a whiteness that obliterates history and erases our collective memory of those who suffered, struggled, and died for past causes that are no longer relevant to our modern time or location. The ‘treaties and white papers’ refer to government documents which in Walcott’s opinion occur in a flurry throughout history, each new document erasing or changing what has gone before until no true history or memory is left. He states that ‘we lose sight of the single human through the cause’, opining that the individual person who suffers and struggles is losing when we only consider politics and society on the macro-level of the ‘cause’. In this poem, he is resolved to focus instead on the individual – in this case, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who chose to suffer and die rather than give in to pressure from the Soviet government to change his poetry and make it align with their own political motives, despite the fact that all his friends and allies had already done so and distanced themselves from him because he refused.

Symbolism – ‘the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light/ in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.’ – the line of poetry takes on an ethereal, spiritual quality; it ‘circles with light’ as Joseph reads it aloud as if it is a living and potent entity that symbolises Mandelstam’s spirit or soul, his core beliefs and perspective on the world. This is juxtaposed with the ‘brown room, in barren Oklahoma’, the adjectives ‘brown’ and ‘barren’ directly contrast the brightness of the poetic line, showing how uninspiring and bland the physical surroundings are, yet the poetry’s ability to transcend this physical space and suffuse the moment with an artistic and spiritual light. 

Metaphor – Walcott calls Mandelstam’s poetry ‘the bread that lasts when systems have decayed’, implying that he feels that art is first and foremost a provider of sustenance, perhaps spiritual rather than physical nourishment. It also has the ability to transcend any transient political system as it ‘lasts’ after they have ‘decayed’, because it speaks to the soul and comments on the human condition, which is a universal experience for us all. 

Repetition – ‘The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva.’ – this line echoes as a motif throughout the poem, and clearly it was an important line that resonated strongly with Walcott. The repeated ‘r’ and ‘n’ sounds evoke the sense of rustling, which also blur with the wintry landscape of Oklahoma as Joseph reads the poem aloud, as Walcott stares out of the window of their cottage and observes the leaves falling off the trees, which perhaps reminds him of the rustling money by the river.

FORM/STRUCTURE 

Elegy – the poem serves as a tribute to Mandelstam and his work, as well as his artistic integrity as he refused to compromise himself or his poems and bend to the will of the Soviet state. In this sense, it is an elegy, a commemoration of a brave man, and an assertion of the continued relevance of his writing in modern times. Walcott is not always completely positive in his elegies, but here he shows nothing but reverence for the man.

Regular meter – the poem is written in quintets – five-line stanzas and has a regular metrical pattern, using iambic pentameter, with five feet of unstressed-stressed syllables per line. This meter closely imitates natural speech, giving the poem a conversational style and rhythm.

Imagism / Visual imagery – ‘As the train passed the forest’s tortured icons, / the floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires / of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam, / he drew them in a single winters’ breath / whose freezing consonants turned into stone.’ – Walcott recounts the imagery that he was exposed to through reading Mandelstam’s poetry, the imagery of Soviet Russia which blends the cold, barren landscape with images of industrialization and progress. The ‘train’ in the poem is presumably to one which Mandelstam himself took when he was exiled from Moscow and forced into prison camps in the Ural Mountains in Siberia.

The stanza imitates the genre of imagism, a modernist form of poetry that originated in the early 1900s and seeks to capture poetic images in a manner that imitates photography and film.

ATTITUDES 

Writers have the power to voice their strong dissent against political authority, but this can sometimes have drastic consequences for themselves – Walcott attests to the power of poetry, which can transcend its location and circumstances and also critique society or oppression. He also wonders at the strength of a figure like Mandelstam, who was able to continue being critical and personal even though he knew it would cost him his life and freedom under the Soviet government. There is a slightly despondent tone as Walcott considers his own poetic power and the potential he has for speaking out against corruption in his own homeland of the West Indies, where governments are notoriously manipulative and corrupt. He notes ‘The tourist archipelagoes of my South / are prisons too, corruptible,’, drawing a direct parallel between the state oppression of his own country and his own power to fight against that as a dissenting and radical voice through poetry. However, far from the physical imprisonment that writers faced in the Russian Gulag, he feels that the Caribbean Islands are ‘prisons’ because of their heavy reliance on tourism, and their governments are intrinsically corrupted. 

Exile is not just a geographical dislocation, but a cultural one too – The addressee ‘Joseph’ and the speaker (Walcott himself) both find themselves dislocated from their homelands in a wintry landscape in Oklahoma. Joseph is presumably Russian as he recites lines from Mandelstam’s poetry, whereas Walcott is St Lucian (Caribbean). Despite the vast differences in culture and lifestyle, they find themselves united as ‘exiles’ in America, as neither are originally from there. Being in exile means to be cut off from your homeland, from familiar cultural surroundings, and to feel a sense of ‘otherness’, of being an outsider.

The process of writing poetry is draining and sometimes like a sickness – here and elsewhere in his poems Walcott observes that the creative process is difficult work, as well as being ritualistic and sacrificial in nature. He speaks of Mandelstam’s poetry as ‘a divine fever’ and ‘a fire whose glow warms our hands’, demonstrating the idea that poetry has the power to transcend time and space, providing comfort and intellectual growth long after the poet himself has passed on.

CONTEXT

Osip Mandelstam – a Russian Soviet poet and essayist who was imprisoned by the Soviet government in 1930, under Joseph Stalin’s rule. He was born in Poland into a Polish-Jewish family under the Russian Empire, and his family relocated to St Petersburg, Russia, soon after his birth. Politically, at first, he supported the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s; his poetry was populist – for the people – and actively opposed elitist beliefs. However, once the Bolsheviks gained power they started forcing all art forms to be adapted to their own political ends, and Mandelstam resisted this. In 1922 he published the collection Tristia, which champions the individual over the collective, suggesting that his political sympathies had changed drastically to no longer support the comradeship and reverence for government proposed by the Russian Communist State. This led to him being rejected even by other Russian artists and poets, most of whom had been coerced into aligning their work with the Communist cause. In the 1930s, he became a specific target of the Communists and when he released a satirical and critical poem in 1933 entitled ‘Stalin Epigram’ for a private audience, he was arrested and tortured. His friend and supporter Nikolay Bukharin, a man prominent in Stalin’s Russia, managed to prevent Mandelstam from being executed, and instead, he was exiled to the Ural Mountains. His exile ended in 1937 but when he traveled back to Moscow, he found that the state had seized his former home. His health took a turn for the worse, and then he was arrested again whilst recovering in a sanatorium. He was sent to the Gulag and died in 1938 after being imprisoned in forced labor camps. 

Neva – a river that runs across Northwestern Russia, through St Petersburg – the former capital of Russia. The line that is repeated in the poem – ‘the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva’ perhaps refers to government corruption and money exchanging hands by the bank of the river. The adjective ‘lemon’ also is arguably a reference to pollution and corruption, since the Neva once had a thriving ecosystem around it, but that was destroyed with industrialization.

Cossacks are a group of East Slavic people (mostly Southern Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians), who have a reputation for military might and horsemanship, though modern Cossacks do not have as fearsome a reputation as their antecedents. 

Gulag Archipelago– a non-fiction text by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about life in the Gulag, Soviet forced labour camps that were set up for prison inmates. The text is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own exile and imprisonment. It exemplifies the oppression of the Soviet regime, taking the form of a ‘literary investigation’, constructing a story through a series of reports, interviews, statements, diary entries, and documents. In Russia, the Gulag and the atrocities that its prisoners faced was considered a taboo subject until the 1980s, despite the text being published in 1973 and other writers also speaking out against the horrors they had experienced when imprisoned by the Soviet Union.  

Trail of Tears – the Trail of Tears is the name given to the forced relocations that the Five Tribes (the Native American Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations) were made to take between the 1830s and 1850s. Around 60,000 Native Americans were removed by the US government from their homelands in the Southern US and forced to march for several weeks to the Indian Territory, Oklahoma. The journey was tough, and many died from starvation and sickness along the way. 

THEMES 

  • Social Justice 
  • Seasons 
  • Exile
  • Alienation 
  • Collectivism vs the Individual 
  • Politics and Government 
  • Oppression 

POSSIBLE ESSAY QUESTIONS 

  1. Discuss Walcott’s attitude to exile in ‘Forest of Europe’ and two other poems of your choice. 

  1. In what ways does Walcott use the setting in ‘Forest of Europe’? 

  1. How far do you agree that Walcott’s poetry always champions the individual over the collective? Use ‘Forest of Europe’ and two other poems of your choice in your response.  


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Here’s an answer I wrote for AQA English Language Paper 2 Question 2. The point of this question is to find detailed and specific points of comparison and contrast between sources. It’s only 8 marks so I probably over-wrote a little: When you do your piece, aim for 2 rather than 3 full paragraphs.


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If you want to check our other resources on English Language Paper 2, you can find them here.


THE QUESTION:

You need to refer to Source A and Source B for this question.

The ways the boys spend their time playing as young children is different.

Use details from both sources to write a summary of the different activities the boy in Source A enjoys and the boy in Source B enjoyed when he was young. [8 marks]

Link to exam paper insert

AQA GCSE English Language Paper 2, Question 2 EXAMPLE ANSWER:

Firstly, Eddie and his father have an informal relationship, whereas Henry addresses his father with extreme respect. Eddie’s gestures — raising ‘his eyebrows’ and being ‘too busy killing things’ imply that he doesn’t respect or revere his father, as he is capable of challenging him or ignoring him, both behaviours which Henry would have considered to be highly unacceptable. Henry uses a formal tone in his letter, addressing his father as ‘my dear Father’, to show formality and demonstrate how much he loves his father. The capitalisation ‘Father’ also suggests that he holds him in very high regard.

Secondly, we can tell that both children love their fathers, though they show this love in very different ways. Eddie’s father has a sardonic, mocking, and often self-deprecating tone, and we can see how Eddie copies this — which demonstrates his love for and close relationship with him. Eddie’s father remarks how Eddie is ‘remorselessly clever’ and how he is able to ‘take the mickey’ out of his parents. There is a humourous tone here, the adverb ‘remorselessly’ implies that Eddie doesn’t feel bad about his disrespectful actions, but underneath we can see that they have a loving relationship, based on humour and irony, as is common in modern society. In contrast, the way in which Henry shows love for his father is to respect 19th Century values of seriousness and propriety. Though his situation is extreme, he speaks carefully to his father, saying ‘I hope…you will let me come home at Xmas that we may once more meet again alive’, showing his love by putting even a dramatic statement which suggests death into formal phrasing.

Finally, there is a sense that Eddie feels his father is quite powerless when it comes to school matters, whereas Henry is counting on his father’s power to get him out of a difficult situation. Eddie’s father is unable to complete the homework, so he ‘tells’ him to ‘just draw a sad face’, the verb ‘tells’ implying that he is used to commanding his father or that they have quite an equal relationship. Conversely, we can see from the second letter that Henry’s father is a tough man and that Henry admires this in him. Though he’s aware that ‘boys sometimes complain without a cause’, he uses many negatives to express his strength of character- ‘I do not approve of the System of Education’ and ‘I do not like the injunction laid upon them’. These further demonstrate that he is a man of confident, strong opinions, and while he loves his sons he does also have strict ideas about how they should be educated.


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