gcse revision - armitage
DESCRIPTION
Presentation from the GCSE revision session on Simon Armitage's poetryTRANSCRIPT
Revise Armitage’s PoemsLooking at:
• common themes (the ideas he writes about)• language• form (the shape and lay out of the poem)
Duffy
HavishamAnne HathawayBefore You Were MineEducation for Leisure
Armitage
Mother, any distanceHomecomingKidHitcher
Pre-1914 poems
On My First SonneSonnet 130My Last DuchessThe Laboratory
Themes in Armitage’s Poems
Hitcher
I’d been tired, under
the weather, but the ansaphone kept screaming:
One more sick-note, mister, and you’re finished, Fired.
I thumbed a lift to where the car was parked.
A Vauxhall Astra. It was hired.
I picked him up in Leeds.
He was following the sun from west to east
with just a toothbrush and the good earth for a bed. The truth,
he said was blowing in the wind,
or round the next bend.
I let him have it
on the top road out of Harrogate – once
with the head, then six times with the krooklock
in the face – and didn’t even swerve.
I dropped into third
and leant across
to let him out, and saw him in the mirror
bouncing off the kerb, the disappearing down the verge.
We were the same age, give or take a week.
He’d said he liked the breeze
to run its fingers
through his hair. It was twelve noon.
The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.
Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.
Themes
Language
Form
Mother, any distance…
Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.
You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.
I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch… I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.
Language
Homecoming
HomecomingThink, two things on their own and both at onceThe first, that exercise in trust, where those in frontstand with their arms spread wide and free-fallbackwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight.
The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacketon a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook, becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot. Back homethe very model of a model of a mother, yours, putstwo and two together, makes a proper fist of itand points the finger. Temper, temper. Questionsin the house. You seeing red. Blue murder. Bed
Then midnight when you slip the latch and sneakno further that the call-box at the corner of the street;I’m waiting by the phone, although it doesn’t ringbecause it’s sixteen years or so before we’ll meet.Retrace that walk towards the garden gate; in silhouettea father figure waits there, wants to set things straight.
Themes
Language
Kid
KidBatman, big shot, when you gave the orderto grow up, then let me loose to wanderleeward, freely through the wild blue yonderas you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter … well, I turned the corner.Now I’ve scotched that ‘he was like a fatherto me’ rumour, sacked it, blown the coveron that ‘he was like an elder brother’story, let the cat out on that caperwith the married woman, how you took herdowntown on expenses in the motor.Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!Holy roll-me-over-in-a-clover, I’m not playing ball boy any longer
Batman, now I’ve doffed that off-the-shoulderSherwood-Forest-green and scarlet numberfor a pair of jeans and crew neck jumper;now I’m taller, harder, stronger, older.Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:you without a shadow, stewing overchicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in-larder,punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder.
Themes
Language
Poem content theme form & point of view
Mother, any distance
A mother helps a son to measure up his new home. The son wants and fears freedom.
• parents and children• love / emotional ties
• 1st person perspective• autobiographical• irregular stanza form
My father thought A son faces his father’s scorn when he returns home with a pierced ear.
• parents and children• love / emotional ties
• 1st person perspective• autobiographical• irregular stanza form
Homecoming A lover reflects on an argument that his partner had in her childhood.
• parents and children• love / emotional ties
• 1st person perspective• irregular stanza form
November John takes his grandmother to an old people’s home and reflects on mortality.
• love / emotional ties• passage of time• death
• 1st person perspective• dramatic monologue• irregular stanza form
Kid Robin, Batman’s sidekick, has grown up, while Batman has grown old.
• character study• passage of time• resentment
• 1st person perspective• dramatic monologue• irregular stanza form
Those Bastards A reflection on social inequality from the point of view of a rebel.
• outsider• reflections on society
• persona / 1st person perspective• sonnet
I’ve made out a will The speaker leaves most of his body to medical science, but not his heart.
• death• love
• 1st person perspective• sonnet
Hitcher A tired and frustrated motorist murders a free-spirited hitch-hiker.
• outsider• resentment• murder / death
• persona / 1st person perspective• sonnet