Hideous, Tedious
Poetry Commentary
No rhyme intended. ;)
So, the English A Literature in IBDP states that we have to write something called a commentary on an unseen poem/prose. We're currently doing poetry, so we have to write a commentary on a poem that we have no idea about and never seen before.
Sounds hard? Especially when you have a time limit of 2 hours to read, analyse, annotate, think and then write it all out in neat paragraphs. And since I'm in HL, apparently I have to analyse into deeper meanings, evaluate and explain in eloquent but concise sentences the "hows and whys". According to my teacher who reminds us almost everyday "SL students can get away with a lot of things and still achieve a good grade, but as HLs, you people HAVE TO EXPLAIN IN GREATER DETAIL, or else NO MARKS."
Oops.
The first one given to us by my teacher was "The Hero" by Siegfried Sassoon. It's only three stanzas with six lines each, and is very easy to understand as the themes are more obvious. She didn't want to scare us off with a challenging poem for our first try.
The problem: we have less than an hour to write, around 45 minutes in fact. My commentary was hasty especially at the end, and I could have structured it better.
I got 13/20 for it.
Many of us got 13, with the highest 14. According to my teacher, I am "on the right track", but need more polishing. Obviously. I don't even like my own work. Messy.
Anyway, this time around we got Ted Hughes' "Wind" as our poem for the holidays. I didn't know until a friend told me yesterday (3 days before school) and I was like "crap!!!"
Anyway I was too tired to do yesterday so I printed it out today and timed myself. I allowed myself up to three hours, but tried to complete it in two hours because that's the time limit for the real exam. Finished it approximately two hours (maybe a little extra).
The thing about poems to me is that themes and messages behind them never seem to jump out at me. Like "Wind", I only saw a glimmer of a possible message behind all the imagery and details of the storm halfway through the third stanza (six in all, four lines each). When I got it and used everything in the poem to support it, it became horribly evident, so I was like "why the hell have I not thought of it while I was reading through it?!"
Same goes to many of Sylvia Plath's poems. We did a lot of her poems by class presentations (among them Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Morning Song, You're, Tulips, The Bee Meeting, Nick And The Candlestick and Elm) but not commentaries. I did a presentation on Elm, and I totally can't imagine doing an unseen commentary on it. I love her style and the imagery, but it took me some time (and lots of googling) to interpret what she was trying to say.
Let's hope I get a higher mark for "Wind"! A 13, though acceptable for a first try, should and could be improved to a better mark. :) Even though commentaries for poems are really tedious, I still love writing. Writing is my life. :D
Love,
Haha, don't worry too much, we've all been where you are before! :) Until today, I still can't wrap my head around the themes and meanings of certain HL poems.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you play your cards well, you can usually game the system :P In short, if you really can't figure out something, just don't write about it la haha. Can't figure out the theme? Don't write about the theme. Can't figure out what one particular line means? Don't write about that line. Go write about something else you're more certain about. ;)
In relation to that, when the interpretation of poetry gets tough - go micro rather than macro. Take this rather abstract poem excerpt as an example:
'Straight from the heart. / I step on it, / Clutching my bottle / Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.'
In lieu of trying to decipher all this horrendous abstractness, you could just skirt the entire big picture and go for the details. For instance, instead of explaining the overall meaning of all the lines, you could just pick out the word 'fizz' and talk about how such an onomatopoeia creates a celebratory tone in the poem. And so on. (And examiners actually quite like that!)
This is probably not the best way to learn literature for the love of the subject in itself - so I wouldn't propagate this 'gaming of the system' when time is on one's side and you can really explore and think for yourself and shizz. But when you have only 2 hours to write a whole freaking commentary, these sort of tactics usually help. They helped me survive more than a year of commentary-writing, so yeah.
Just sharing these literature hacks, in case they help you! :D
Hi Hannah,
DeleteThanks for the tip! It'll be extra useful for difficult poems that make no sense whatsoever. ;)
Thanks
Michelle