Device-Spotting Is Not Analysis in a Stanza
A student's 5-mark answer on a four-line stanza has 10 minutes to be rewritten. The stanza reads: 'The city wears a coat of smoke; / its windows blink like tired eyes; / the traffic argues at the lights; / and silence is a locked door.' The student's first draft lists six devices: simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration, oxymoron, and enjambment. The teacher's marginal comment says: 'Three labels are wrong or unsupported; no device is linked to effect. You are naming, not analysing.' The student can quote the stanza but must not add other poems. The mark scheme awards 1 mark for accurate identification and 4 marks for explaining how devices create meaning.
1. Which of the six labels should be kept, merged, or dropped? Explain the most important correction.
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Keep simile for 'like tired eyes.' Keep metaphor for 'silence is a locked door.' Keep personification for 'the traffic argues' and for 'the city wears,' though 'wears a coat of smoke' can also be called metaphor; the two labels overlap, so merge them rather than listing both as separate achievements. Drop oxymoron: there is no contradiction such as 'bitter sweet' or 'living death' in the stanza. Drop enjambment: the quoted lines end with punctuation, and the setup gives no line-break evidence of a sentence running over. Alliteration is weak; 'city' and 'coat' are not close enough to build a sound-effect claim, and 'silence' and 'locked' are separated. If the student cannot say what the sound does, drop it.
The most important correction is that 'the city wears a coat of smoke' is not a simile. There is no 'like' or 'as'; it gives the city a human action. Recognising this protects the accuracy mark and opens the way to effect: the city is dressed, almost disguised, by its own pollution.
2. Rewrite one device from the stanza as a function statement that would earn marks under the 1+4 scheme.
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A function statement must name the device and then say what it does to the reader's sense of the scene. Weak: 'The poet uses personification in "the traffic argues."' Stronger: 'By making traffic "argue" at the lights, the stanza turns an ordinary delay into a human quarrel, so the street feels confrontational before the final line's "locked door" shuts the noise out.' This earns more because it links device to effect and to structure: the noise of the street is set against the silence that follows.
A second model: 'The simile "like tired eyes" makes the windows both human and exhausted, so the city seems drained rather than merely dark.' Again, the device is identified, but the sentence goes on to describe the quality of the impression. Under a 1+4 scheme, the student should spend at most one short clause on naming and the rest on effect. The final line is especially useful: 'silence is a locked door' is a metaphor that makes silence something built and shut, not simply absent. A good answer could contrast the arguing traffic with that locked door to show how the stanza moves from noise to closure.