Poetry – Relationships cluster summary

Poem Summary Themes Feelings Links to… Key quotes‘The Manhunt’ by Simon Armitage

- The narrator is the wife of a soldier who has come home from war with serous gun shot wounds.- It is more difficult to see and understand his mental scars and the problems these cause.

Pain and sufferingTime (the father will not be able to protect his son as he grows up)

CaringPatiencePain

‘Nettles’ - the suffering of a loved one

‘Praise Song’ – relationship between parent and child

-‘the parachute silk of his punctured lung’- ‘I picture the scan,/the foetus of metal’- ‘ a sweating unexploded mine/buried deep in his mind’- ‘I come close’

‘Hour’ by Carol Ann Duffy

- Describes and hour spent between the narrator and her lover- The poet personifies time as love’s enemy- Love almost manages to make time stand still

- Love against time- Fairy tale love does not last

- cherishing the moment- strong belief in love- Physical pleasure

- ‘To His Coy Mistress’ – time as the enemy of love

-‘Sonnet 116’ – time and love, personification

- ‘Love’s time’s beggar’

- ‘For thousands of seconds, we kiss’

-‘Now. Time hates love,’

-‘Love spins gold, gold, gold from straw’‘In Paris with You’ by James Fenton

-The narrator is upset about love – he’s split up with someone and sees himself as a victim-He’s gone to Paris with someone else, but still seems unhappy- He doesn’t want to go out in the city – he’d rather stay in the hotel room

-Negative emotions

-Hurt

-Self pity

-Bitterness

-humour

-lust

-‘To His Coy Mistress’ – narrator as seducer; humour

-‘Sister Maude’ – anger

-‘Quickdraw’ – being hurt by someone

-‘I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two’

-‘I’m a hostage’

-‘Don’t talk to me of love’

-‘all points south’

‘Quickdraw’ by Carol Ann Duffy

-The poem compares phone calls and texts in a relationship to a gun fight in a western movie-The narrator always seems to come off worst, and is left hurt-What ‘finishes her off’ isn’t cruelty, but text message kisses, which hit her like bullets

-Attitudes towards love

-hurt

-Hurt

-Expectation

-Tension

-‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and ‘In Paris with You’ – hurt from love

-‘The Manhunt’ - communication

-‘like guns, slung from the pockets of my hips’

-‘your voice a pellet/in my ear’

-‘the silver bullets of your kiss’

-‘high noon, calamity, hard liquor/In the old Last Chance saloon’

‘Ghazal’ by Mimi Khalvati

-The narrator is talking about intense feeling of love

-Attitudes towards love

-Intense love-playfulness

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and ‘Nettles’ and

‘iron fist in the velvet glove’

-In each stanza, she creates a new message to portray love through imagery

-Lust-Love poetry (the ghazal structure)

-Pleasure ‘Hour’ – natural imagery

-‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘Hour’ -lust

-‘charmer, use your charm, weave a spell and subdue me’

-‘don’t hand/on my lips’

-‘I’ll be twice the me’‘Brothers’ by Andrew Forster

-The narrator remembers a moment from childhood when he and his older brother had to look after their younger brother-They are fed up with him, but excited to be out on their own-They send their younger brother home to get the bus fare, then run off, leaving him behind

-Family relationships

-Sibling relationships

-Frustration

-Guilt

-Freedom

-regret

-‘Nettles’ – reflecting on a childhood incident as an adult

-‘Sister Maude’ – an unhappy event in a sibling relationship

‘Saddled with you’

-‘spouting six-year old views’

-‘we must stroll’

-‘unable to close the distance’

‘Praise Song for my Mother’ by Grace Nichols

-The mum in the poet was the whole world to her child-The narrator compares her mum to water and food – vital for life-Also compares her mum to moon and the sun (both masculine and feminine role in her life)

-Parental love

-Being prepared for life

-Gratitude

-Joy

-Prase

-‘Nettles’ – parent child relationships

-‘Ghazal’ – natural imagery

-‘You were water to me’

-‘deep and bold and fathoming’

-‘replenishing replenishing’

-‘Go to your wide futures’‘Sonnet 116’ by William Shakespeare

-Shakespeare is writing about how constant true love is-True love doesn’t change when circumstances change-‘He says that if what he says isn’t true, then he never wrote anything and nobody has ever been in love. Since we know he did write and people have loved, he’s saying his words are true.

-Attitudes towards love

-True love is not fickle and does not change over time

-Devotion

-Constancy

-True love

-‘To His Coy Mistress’ – the effects of ageing on love

-‘The Manhunt’ – constancy and true love

‘Time’s fool’

-‘edge of doom’

-‘it is the star to every wand’ring bark’

-‘Admit impediments’

‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell

-The narrator is telling the woman that he loves that she shouldn’t play hard to get – there isn’t time-The poem is structured into a three part argument - the first part

-The passage of time

-Seduction

-Impatience

-Urgency

-Reluctance

-‘Sonnet 116’ – the effects of time and death

-‘Hour’and ‘In Paris

- ‘Deserts of vast eternity’

- ‘My vegetable love should grow’

explaining how much he would worship her and what they would do together if there was time-the second part describes how there is not time and shows what will happen when they grow old-the third part declares that they must live for the moment , make the most of their youth

-Death

-Physical desire

with You’ – lust and physical love

- ‘A grave’s a fine and pleasant place’

- ‘Now’

- ‘like amorous birds of prey’

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ by Charlotte Mew

-The farmer has been married for 3 years, but his bride is still frightened of him-He tells the story of how the relationship went wrong-He finds her rejection almost unbearable. By the end he seems to be struggling to resist taking her by force

-Unhappy love -Frustration

-Desire

-Fear

-‘Hour’ and ‘In Paris with You’ – love seen as an intense experience

-‘To His Coy Mistress’ – frustrated narrator

-‘Shy as a leveret, swift as he’

-‘Straight and slight as a young larch tree’

-‘poor maid’

-‘her hair, her hair’

‘Sister Maude’ by Christina Rossetti

-The poem’s narrator has kept her boyfriend a secret from her parents – but her sister has told them about him-The narrator is angry with her sister for this and her boyfriend’s death-The narrator is also jealous that her boyfriend may have desired her sister

-Intense emotions

-Family relationships

-Sibling relationships

-Betrayal

-Jealousy

-Anger

-‘Sonnet 116’ – intense feelings

-‘Brothers’ – family relationships

-‘comeliest corpse’

-‘Cold he lies, as cold as stone/ With his clotted curls’

-‘shall get no sleep/ Either early or late’

-‘Bide you with death and sin’

‘Nettles’ by Vernon Scannell

-The narrator’s son has fallen in a bed of nettles and is badly stung-His father comforts him, then cuts down the nettles. However, they grow back two weeks later-The story shows how parents can’t always protect their children from pain-The poet uses an extended military metaphor to express the threat from

-Feelings about loved ones

-Family relationships

-Anger

-Revenge

-Tenderness

-Helplessness

-‘Born Yesterday’ – the hopes and fears that adults have for children

-‘Sister Maude’ – anger; family relationships

-‘regiment of spite’

-‘those green spears’

-‘blisters beaded’

-‘that fierce parade’

the nettles‘Born Yesterday’ by Philip Larkin

-Larkin wrote this poem the day after the birth of his friend’s daughter-He takes the fairy tale idea of giving out wishes to a new born, but his wish is not for great beauty or exciting things – he wishes for practical, useful talents which he knows will help her most to be happy (as Larkin knows how hard it is to be happy)

-Priorities

-Family relationships

-Happiness

-Surviving life

-Tenderness

-Scorn

-Realism

-Cynicism

-‘Sonnet 116’ – the idea that beauty is not necessary for real love/happiness

-‘Nettles’ – an adult’s hopes and concerns for a child

-‘Hour’ – the fairy tale is not important for love – the simple things count far more

-‘Tightly-folded bud’

-‘May you be ordinary’

‘Not ugly, not good-looking’

-‘skilled,/Vigilant,flexible,/Unemphasised,enthralled/Catching of happiness’