Unseen poem: turning a device list into an argument
In the unseen-poetry part of the paper you meet a twenty-line poem, 'Market Day', by a Caribbean poet you have not studied. The speaker is a girl who helps her mother sell fruit in a town square. The first two stanzas hold to the plural pronoun - 'Is we basket, we cloth, we name the stall' - and the verbs are in Creole throughout. In stanza three, with no announcement, the pronoun switches to 'I' for six lines: 'I counting the coins, I watching the clock.' The final couplet returns to 'we': 'We two does walk home slow, / we two is all I know.' The question reads: 'How does the poet make the speaker's feelings about her mother vivid?' You have twenty-five minutes and about five hundred words. Ten minutes in, your plan contains a column of four features - anaphora, dialect, repetition, enjambment - and not one sentence of argument.
1. Your plan is a column of four features. Explain what you must do to convert it into an argument about the speaker's feelings, and give the first two sentences of the essay that would result.
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Labelling is not analysis. A column of devices tells the examiner what you can name; the question asks what the naming does for the feeling, so each feature must be turned into a claim about work done: what does the repetition hold together, what does the Creole allow the speaker to say that standard English would not?
Three moves do the conversion:
- Find the hinge. The pronoun shift from 'we' to 'I' and back is the poem's structure, and the essay should be organised around it, not around a list. The features are not four items - the anaphora is what builds the 'we' (a shared inventory of basket, cloth, stall), and the isolated 'I counting' is the child discovering herself as a separate person.
- Name the feeling precisely and in tension. Not 'love', but tenderness tangled with the risk of being counted separately. 'We two is all I know' is comfort and limit at once.
- Attach effect to the reader. Say what the shift makes a reader do: re-read the couplet, hear the walk slow down.
Opening sentences that follow: 'The poem's feeling for the mother is never separate from work: the anaphora that inventories the stall - basket, cloth, name - makes love a shared labour rather than a sentiment. When the pronoun breaks to "I" in the third stanza, the poet risks the togetherness the first two stanzas have built, and the couplet's return to "we" is won back rather than assumed.' Both sentences make a claim that evidence can support or qualify.
2. A classmate proposes the thesis: 'The poet uses dialect, repetition and imagery to show the speaker loves her mother.' Give two reasons why this thesis will limit the mark, and rewrite it as a claim worth arguing.
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Reason one: it is a list, not a claim. Three devices plus a flat emotion could describe almost any Caribbean poem about family. A thesis worth arguing should be one a reasonable reader could disagree with; 'the poet shows love' invites no disagreement, so the body paragraphs can only supply examples, not build a case.
Reason two: it flattens the poem's conflict. The shift to 'I' becomes an inconvenience you must explain away, and 'imagery' is a catch-all that commits you to nothing. An examiner reading the essay will see that the most interesting moment in the poem has been neutralised.
Rewrite: 'The poem makes tenderness inseparable from labour and from the fear of separation: the "we" that names the stall is the same "we" the child is beginning to learn she cannot always live inside.' This version names a tension, commits to a reading of the pronoun shift, and can be tested against the couplet - which is what the following paragraphs should do.
3. Write 60–80 words of analysis of the closing couplet, focusing on grammar and rhythm, and state what you deliberately avoided saying.
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'The couplet fuses the two people grammatically: "we two is" uses non-standard singular concord, so a plural subject takes a singular verb and the pair becomes one thing. "All I know" then turns affection into the edge of knowledge - the mother is the child's whole world, which is both security and confinement. The monosyllables and the end-stop slow the line to walking pace.'
What I avoided: calling the couplet 'effective' or 'memorable' without saying what produces the effect. Adjectives of approval are not analysis; concord, lexis and pace are. I also avoided claiming the poet 'breaks grammar for emphasis' in a general way - the specific non-standard concord matters because it performs fusion rather than merely signalling Creole identity. Note too that this is a reading, not a certainty: another candidate could argue the singular verb marks the child's immaturity of speech, and that reading can be defended too, provided it is argued from the words rather than announced.