Poetry
Poetry Unpacked is a series of long-form close readings for students who want to think seriously about poems. These aren’t model answers, but worked examples of how an interpretation and meaning can be made through patient attention to language, informed by relevant context.
Want to see a particular poem covered? Get in touch.
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Sylvia Plath – Spinster
in PoetryThis final stanza is horribly defensive with its ‘barb and check’. Suddenly we’re in a war-zone, under attack, fighting for our lives.
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09.08 Philip Larkin
I remember the first time I really noticed “spring-woken tree”. Honestly, I just thought: wow. I stopped reading … … and that is the biggest compliment I can pay any author
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John Donne – The Canonization
in PoetryEver been in a relationship your parents / careers disapproved of? In this reading, John Donne privately vents all the things he -wished- he’d said to his disapproving father-in-law..
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Philip Larkin – Talking in Bed
in PoetryAs BB King might sing, ‘The thrill is gone’. But Larkin’s speaker – arguably Larkin himself – lacks the courage to end the relationship.
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06.03 EB Browning
It took marriage and emigration for Elizabeth Barrett Browning to find her voice and trust it to say what she kept within her.
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13.06 WB Yeats
Some things are difficult because they are worth wrestling with. Not because someone else has decided they are too complex for you.
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RS Thomas – ‘Cynddylan On A Tractor’
in PoetryAn old Welsh hero on a modern steed, or a traitor to his culture, and a way of life which is struggling to survive the twentieth century? Analysis with clarity. Commentary with heart.
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Christina Rossetti – ‘No, Thank You, John.’
in PoetryRossetti employs commas like stun grenades, in the final line of this surprisingly modern poem about unwanted attention.
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson – ‘The Eagle’
in PoetryDon’t be fooled by this poem’s brevity. Tennyson ‘could polish a pebble until it became a gem’, and that’s what he does here.