Two Readings of a Scarecrow: Marking Tone in an Unseen Poem
The unseen poem on your Class X test is a sixteen-line lyric, 'Fieldwork', spoken by a scarecrow. It begins with the speaker addressing the crows as 'my black congregation' and calling its own body 'a sermon of straw'; the last stanza admits that the field it guards 'has forgotten my name'. The item for 4 marks reads: 'What is the tone of the speaker's address to the crows, and how does personification create that tone? Support your answer from the poem.' Candidate R writes: 'The tone is sad. The scarecrow is alone in the field and the field has forgotten his name, so he is very sad and nobody likes him.' Candidate S writes: 'The tone is grimly humorous and defiant. The scarecrow calls the crows a congregation and his body a sermon, so a silent object is given a preacher's voice; the joke is aimed at the crows, but the last stanza shows the loneliness under the joke.' Two examiners disagree: one wants R to get 2 for catching the sadness, the other wants 1 because 'sad' misses the humour.
1. Award R and S out of 4 and write the rationale you would record for the moderation file.
Read the worked answer
S = 4, R = 2.
The item has three demands: name the tone, explain how personification creates it, support from the poem. S meets all three and adds a complication that shows genuine reading.
- Tone named precisely: 'grimly humorous and defiant' is compound; it accounts for the address to the crows and for the last stanza at once.
- Device explained, not merely spotted: 'a silent object is given a preacher's voice' explains the mechanism. Personification here is a role reversal - the thing that is ignored becomes the one who preaches.
- Effect traced: 'the joke is aimed at the crows, but the last stanza shows the loneliness under the joke' shows how the poem moves between two tones. That is what 'how' means.
R (2) has one true insight (the last stanza does produce sadness) and one piece of support (the field has forgotten his name). But R treats the tone as single and ignores the audience - the address to the crows. R never mentions personification. On a 4-mark scale, one accurate but undeveloped point with support sits in the middle band.
On the examiners' dispute: the colleague who wants 1 is punishing R for what R did not say rather than crediting what R did say. The colleague who wants 2 is right on the mark but wrong to stop there - R needs the feedback that 'sad' is a starting point, not a reading.
For the file: a single tone word can earn partial credit; it cannot earn full credit where the question also asks how the tone is made.
2. A colleague argues that any tone word a student can defend should be accepted. State a defensible policy and its limits.
Read the worked answer
Policy: accept any tone word that the candidate can (a) sustain against the whole poem, (b) support with a specific quotation or close reference, and (c) reconcile with the evidence pointing the other way. Apply it in two steps.
Step 1 - is the word defensible? 'Sad' is defensible here: the field has forgotten the scarecrow's name. 'Bitter' is also defensible. 'Cheerful' is not, because nothing in the poem supports it; that answer should be marked wrong, not treated as a misunderstanding.
Step 2 - has the word been used to answer the question? This is where 'sad' fails, and not at step 1. The question asks about the address to the crows and about personification. 'Sad' describes the speaker's condition; it does not describe his attitude to the crows, nor explain what the preaching metaphor is doing. The word is admissible but insufficient.
Limits of the policy: it must not slide into 'anything goes'. Three safeguards - the evidence must come from the poem, not from the candidate's feelings about scarecrows; the word must survive a counter-example from the text; and the candidate must still address every part of the question. A classroom formula that encodes all three: claim + quotation + comment on the quotation. If the third element is missing, the mark stops at half, however deep the claim sounds.