Form and Structure

Climbing My Grandfather
1. Waterhouse presents the reader with an extended metaphor, which compares a kindly old man and a craggy mountain.
2. Through imagining climbing his grandfather as a mountain, the speaker is able to recall clear details from his childhood of scaling a great man. Although he may have lost his grandfather, these memories help the speaker to feel closer to the man he knew.
3. The poem is an example of narrative verse (a poem that tells a story)
4. The poem is presented as a single verse of 27 lines.
5. Presenting the poem as one continuous piece may link to the idea of an imposing mountain waiting to be climbed.
6. The poet uses enjambment often in the poem and this supports the idea of climbing a mountain and making transitions from one stage to the next of a continual journey.
7. There is no set rhythmic pattern, so the tone is gentle, relaxed and conversational, almost as if the poet’s mind is wandering from memory to memory.
Follower
1. The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions, but later learns how skilled the work is. He recalls his admiration of his father then; but now his father walks behind.
2. His father is not literally behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps he feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he cannot live up to his father's example.
3. The poem has 6stanzas with 4lines
4. The simile ‘his shoulders like a full sail strung between the shafts and the furrow’ emphasises how powerful and vast he appeared to Heaney as a child.
Sonnet 29
1. It has 1 stanza with 14lines
2. 5 syllables are stressed
3. She expresses the idea that thinking of her future husband is such an intense feeling that it ultimately overpowers her.
4. The whole poem is based on one comparison.
5. This metaphor is kept up all the way through. This is called an extended metaphor.
6. Iambic pentameter. di-DA
Walking Away
1. A parent remembers the first time their child grew in independence, eighteen years ago, during a game of football. The child is ‘like a satellite’ and is ‘drifting away’. The speaker in the poem finds the experience difficult and goes on to describe how the child, like a ‘half-fledged thing’, began to find his or her own feet.
2. 4stanzas with 5lines in each
3. The pace of the poem is measured, reflecting the thought processes of the parent.
Eden Rock
1. The speaker of the poem appears to be talking about his dead parents in the afterlife
2. They tell the son that it's not hard to cross over into the other world.
3. It is written in quatrains (4stanzas with 4lines each)
Mother, Any Distance
1. 2 quatrains and 1 stanza with 7 lines
2. The speaker in the poem (who may be the poet himself) is measuring up a house - it appears that he is moving in, and is measuring for curtains and carpets. His mother has “come to help” him as he needs “a second pair of hands”
3. Lose sonnet
4. Each stanza ends with a full stop
5. Mother being referred to as an anchor.An anchor keeps you safe.
Letters From Yorkshire
1. The poem opens with a description of a man working in his garden, planting potatoes, seeing lapwing birds return after winter, then the speaker imagines him coming inside to write to her.
2. 5 stanzas with 3lines
3. Most of the lines have five beats or stresses
4. Although they are far apart in distance and in what they are doing, the poet shows how close she feels by using ‘you’ instead of ‘he’
5. The speaker is busy with her work, typing on to a computer and thinking about the news headlines. She asks the direct question 'is your life more real...?' because he is connected with the land, but knows he would not agree with this.
Before You Were Mine
1. The poet is talking to her mother, having seen a photo of her mother as a teenager.
2. She describes the photo of her mother standing laughing with two of her friends.
3. 4stanzas with 5lines each
4. She knows that the thought of having a child one day doesn't occur to her mother when young, when she was wrapped up in a world of dances and teenage dreams.
Singh Song
1. The structure does not stay the same throughout, but cycles through a number of different stanza patterns, finishing in four two-line stanzas that follow a conversation between the narrator and his bride. The structure is highly repetitive, creating a sense of closeness between the two speakers.
2. He shows his adoration, affection and love for his “newly bride” and describing her tummy as a “teddy”
3. Singh Song is a first-person love song by a young man about his wife. He manages his father's shop but keeps sneaking upstairs to see her instead. He paints a colourful picture of their love and lives, challenging stereotypical ideas about Indian culture.
Winter Swans
1. The speaker's partner comments that the birds 'mate for life' and this observation seems to remind the pair that they have done the same. Where the first half of the poem refers to storms and darkness, we now have a mention of 'light', implying a positive turn for the relationship.
2. A couple are walking through the 'gulping' mud alongside a lake in winter. They are 'silent and apart' and the reader feels as if the previous 'two days of rain' might have coincided with an argument between the pair. They appear distant.
3. 6stanzas with 3 lines, 1stanza with 2lines
Neutral Tones
1. It is written in quatrains (4stanzas with 4lines each)
2. It has the uncomfortable feeling which existed between the two people involved and in the eventual breakdown of their relationship.
3. Hardy starts the poem with two people in the now-failed relationship
4. The second verse looks at the woman’s eyes and the boredom in them
5. Hardy notes that whenever he experiences a painful reminder of deceiving love, he pictures the woman’s face, and the winter landscape by the pond.
6. The third looks at the dead smile on the woman’s mouth, the smile that is no longer alive and joyous.

Next up

Form and Structure

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by Lily Clarke almost 9 years ago