Attitude in a Poem: Marking Beyond the Topic Label
Candidates read this poem and answer a 4-mark question.
Mending the Net
Dusk salts the harbour; he kneels on the quay and works the torn mesh like a man unpicking years. The knife is blunt, the twine is older than the boat. He could go home. The lamp is on. He stays.
Once his son’s hands were quick here. Now the knots he ties are single, and he ties them slow, and each one holds a name he does not say. The tide turns over; gulls go quiet; he stays.
By dark the net is whole enough for morning, not whole enough to keep. He folds it, stands, and leaves the lamp to argue with the water.
Question: “How does the poet present the speaker’s attitude to work? Support with close reference.” A student writes: “The poet’s attitude is positive. He says the work is hard but he loves it. This is shown by ‘salt in the seams of his hands’, which tells us he works a lot.”
1. Award the response out of 4 and explain the banding you are applying.
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1 of 4.
What the answer does: it offers an attitude label (“positive,” “loves it”) - an attempt at the task - and it gestures at evidence. That earns the lowest band.
Why it cannot go higher:
- The quotation does not exist in the poem. The poem opens “Dusk salts the harbour”; there is nothing about seams of hands. Under close-reference marking, an invented quotation is not evidence, whatever it evokes.
- “Loves it” is not supported. The poem shows persistence under difficulty - “He could go home. The lamp is on. He stays.” - and the third stanza undercuts any achievement: “whole enough for morning, / not whole enough to keep.” Devotion, obstinacy and provisionality are available; joy is not.
- No method is discussed: repetition, the caesura in “He could go home. The lamp is on. He stays.,” the shift from dusk to dark.
Band descriptors to share: 4 - sustained attitude claim, accurate quotation, attention to method and structure; 3 - sound claim with some method; 2 - general comment with one accurate reference; 1 - assertion or label with inaccurate reference; 0 - no reference to attitude.
2. Explain the difference between “attitude,” “tone” and “mood” in this question, and rewrite the student’s first two sentences as a defensible claim.
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The distinction: attitude is a stance towards something - here, towards the work of mending. Tone is the manner in which the poet writes, which produces that stance for the reader. Mood is the feeling the poem creates in the reader, or the atmosphere of the scene (dusk, quiet gulls, the turning tide). The question asks about attitude, so an answer that says “the mood is sad” has answered a different question.
There is also a hidden ambiguity worth naming: the poet presents a man’s attitude to work; the poet’s own attitude is a further step, inferred from how the man is framed. Strong answers keep the two distinct.
Rewritten claim: “The poet presents the man’s attitude to work as obstinate rather than joyful: he ‘could go home’ and does not, and the work is a way of holding on to his son - ‘each one holds a name he does not say’ - rather than a means of earning.”
This claim does three things the original does not: it is specific, it is recoverable from the text, and it commits to an interpretation that a counter-argument could challenge.
3. Write a full-mark paragraph on one stanza that models what “close reference” and attention to structure look like at this level.
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Model paragraph (final stanza): The poem’s attitude to work is defined by its ending, and the stanza is built to withhold satisfaction. “Whole enough for morning, / not whole enough to keep” sets two halves of a line against each other, so the net is judged twice and fails the second test; the line break between them holds the pause in which the reader feels the verdict land. The verbs then come in a small, flat sequence - “folds it, stands” - with no object and no lingering, resisting the elegiac tone that “leaves the lamp to argue with the water” seems to invite. That final image gives the last word to the water, not the lamp, and not the man: the work is provisional, repeated, and not his to complete. The poem’s movement from dusk to dark across three stanzas enacts the same point structurally - the mending fills a night, not a life.
Why this is top-band: a clear attitude claim; accurate quotation; analysis of syntax, line break and image; and structural observation (dusk to dark; three “stays”) tied back to the claim rather than listed as a feature.