Critical essays and Barnaby again

First of all, I gave back the Textual Analysis assessments, which most people passed. I’ve now decided to delay the reassessment for one week, so it’ll be on 2 December. Next week, therefore, I’m going to finish the class at 8 for those who passed and spend the later part of the lesson doing some intensive revision with those who didn’t quite pass. Then on 2 December, class will begin at 7.30 pm for those who don’t need to resit.

We then considered poetry as a subject for a critical ( ie literature) essay in the exam. I said – because it’s certainly true for me – that it’s easier to learn a poem and (more or less) everything there is to say about it than it is to do the same for a novel. To that extent, it’s easier to write about a poem in the exam than about a novel or a play. For novels and plays, you must – while sitting in the exam room - select extracts and aspects to write about which are relevant to the question. For poems, assuming that the poem is relevant to the question, you’re writing about the whole poem – or most of it – so the selection process is largely avoided.

The downside of this is that while the novel and play questions are usually fairly general (“Choose a novel where the main character learns something about himself” – this is the case in almost all novels), the poetry questions are much more specific (“Choose a poem about an animal” or “Choose a poem with a sinister tone”). This means that you’re very likely indeed to get a novel and play question that you can answer but you're much less likely to get a poetry question that’s appropriate to any one poem.

If you do get such a question, however, then (in my opinion) poetry questions are easier - for the above reasons.

We looked at the poem “Museé des Beaux Arts” (the Museum of Beautiful Arts) by W H Auden, which is partly about the painting of Icarus by Brueghel,/Bruegel / Breughel (variously spelt) in this museum in Paris. I then gave you an exemplar of an essay on the subject of a poem which showed contrast.

In “A Patchwork Planet”, we just had time to look at chapter 10, in which Barnaby sells the car to Len Parrish and hands over the money to his mother. He’s very reluctant in the end to let the car go, which shows us its importance to him. To his disappointment, the handover of the money falls flat: his mother is suspicious as to where he got it and his father is shocked that he has sold the Corvette.

Then the reader finds out that Mrs Glynn has found the money that she thought was stolen – she’s just misplaced it. Barnaby is very forgiving, but Sophia seems surprisingly upset. It turns out that she has withdrawn her savings and put them in the flour bin to protect Barnaby.

He immediately realises that this seems to be proof that she really thought he’d stolen the money, but he’s disarmed by Sophia’s reference to the O Henry (above) story in which a young married couple each secretly sell their most prized possessions (the girl’s long, beautiful hair and the man’s pocket watch) to buy presents for each other (a clasp for her hair and a chain for his watch). Sophia likens this to her pointless sacrifice of her savings, and Barnaby is distracted from her obvious lack of trust in him by the romantic way she puts this: “You are your gift to me, Barnaby”.

Is anybody reading this, by the way? Comments would be good, as proof!