Comparative poetry essay: two poems, one question, forty minutes
Your class has studied 'Farewell, Green Hills', a forty-line poem in which a man about to board a ship for England walks his village boundary one last time, addressing the hills, the gully and his grandmother's gate. The examination gives you a poem you have never seen, 'Passport Photograph', fourteen lines long, in which a woman describes a booth photograph and the official who tells her not to smile. The question reads: 'Compare the ways the two poets present the experience of leaving home.' You have forty minutes and one side of paper for planning. You know the set poem well enough to quote from memory; you have read the unseen poem twice and understood most of it. Your draft plan is: a paragraph on the set poem's imagery, a paragraph on the unseen poem's imagery, a paragraph on both poets' tone. Your teacher's comment on your last essay was: 'This is two mini-essays stapled together.'
1. Explain why the poem-by-poem plan fails the comparative demand, and propose an organising principle you could actually write in forty minutes.
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The plan fails because comparison is a relation, not a sequence. Two separate accounts of imagery leave the examiner to do the comparing, and the final paragraph on 'tone' will almost certainly split back into two halves, producing the same structure a third time.
A workable organising principle comes from the question's own terms - 'the experience of leaving home'. Ask what each poem does with four sub-questions:
- What is being left? The set poem treats hills and a gate as things that can be addressed and might answer; the unseen poem converts the person into a photograph, a document for an official.
- Who is spoken to? The set poem addresses the place; the unseen poem quotes an official's imperative and the speaker's compliance.
- Who is doing the leaving? The set poem's speaker is an agent taking a last walk; the unseen speaker is being processed.
- How does each poem end? One keeps appealing, the other submits.
Each body paragraph then contains both poems and a relational claim ('whereas', 'both', 'the difference is one of...'). Coverage need not be equal - one clause may carry the shorter poem - but both poems must be present in every paragraph, and every paragraph must say something about difference or similarity in attitude, which is what 'the ways' asks for.
2. How would you spend the forty minutes, and what specifically would you do with the unseen poem in the first six?
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Roughly: 6–7 minutes annotating the unseen poem against the question; 4–5 minutes planning under comparative headings; 25–26 minutes writing; 3 minutes checking quotations and that every paragraph names both poems.
The unseen poem cannot be memorised, so the highest-value activity is structural reading rather than device-hunting. In the first six minutes I would answer, in the margin:
- Who speaks, and to whom?
- What is happening, in one sentence - and what changes between the first and last line?
- Which one formal feature recurs (here, quoted speech and imperative verbs)?
- Where is the diction odd or surprising?
- Which single quotation from the unseen poem will I use in each paragraph, and can I copy it accurately?
The set poem's advantage is that quotations are free, so time spent there is cheap - but that is exactly the trap: a forty-line poem invites retelling. The thirty-line length difference is not a reason to give the set poem three-quarters of the essay. Balance the argument, not the word count: if the unseen poem is the sharper evidence on endings, it may legitimately get more space in that paragraph.
3. Write the topic sentence and supporting analysis for the paragraph in which the two poems most sharply differ, and explain your choice.
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I would choose the endings, because that is where the attitude to leaving is decided and where both poems can be handled in a few lines.
Topic sentence: 'Both poems refuse a clean departure, but they do it with opposite grammatical gestures: the set poet keeps addressing the place as a "you" who might answer, while the unseen poet lets the speaker become the object an official records.'
Supporting analysis: in the set poem, 'Wait for me, gully, I am not gone yet' is apostrophe - the village is held as a listener, so leaving is presented as a relationship under strain rather than an event completed. In 'Passport Photograph' the only quoted speech belongs to the official - 'Do not smile' - and the speaker's reply is compliance, so the poem's final move is obedience and the 'I' never acts. The difference is not decorative: one poem grieves a relationship, the other records a transaction.
Why this paragraph: it makes the two poems answer each other in the same breath, it uses a short, accurately copied quotation from the unseen text, and it lets me concede a similarity ('both refuse a clean departure') before arguing a difference - the pattern examiners reward, because it shows comparison rather than parallel description.