Various

Again, a short blog because it was a short class – the first part was taken up with the Personal Study. Congratulations on your mainly very good prelim marks, by the way – though it’s possible that your actual exam marks won’t be quite so starry (though they might – as I explained, paper 2 is a bit of an unknown quantity to us at the moment).

We then read Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”, a villanelle (Google it if you’re not sure what this is) which is open to considerable interpretation. The basic message is that we shouldn’t die without protest because there will always be regrets: wise men will regret that they didn’t light up the world with their insights; good men that they didn’t change the world; wild men that they hurt people; serious men that they didn’t have more fun. There are lots of metaphors suggesting these things, for which you may like to find other meanings, and this is fine as long as you can justify them. The word choice is very powerful: particularly words expressing anger and other emotions.

This could be used for questions on a poem which unfolds its meaning only after study (and even then isn't crystal clear) ; a poem about death; a poem with a specific poetic form (you wouldn’t have to explain what a villanelle is, but you’d write about the effect: the almost hypnotic repetition, the musical, chorus-like impression, the emphasis of the limited number of rhymes…), a poem with contrasts, a poem addressed to a person (his father)….

We then went over the 2007 Close Reading, passage 2, about the digitisation of the Bodleian

and the boy sitting in the courtyard of Cambridge University Library. This is homework – and if you didn’t do the first passage then I’d be happy to get both together next week. Or not.