English Literature GCSE | what I am studying this year ✨

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to a quick, chatty, informal post, because (confession time!) it's Friday night and I don't have a post for tomorrow, which is unlike me, but I've been very busy with school as it's the end of term, which brings many assessments! However, I have been enjoying English at the moment, so I wanted to share what I am studying this year as part of my GCSEs. 

Whereas English Language is the bane of my existence, I love English Literature. So far for my GCSE, I've studied An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestly, which although I enjoyed, I ended up doing it multiple times and I'm a little bit bored of it! However, I did really get into the story and there is a lot to unpick. 

In case you are not from the UK or didn't study this for your GCSEs, An Inspector Calls is a play written in 1945 but set in 1912, which tells the story of the Birling family as an Inspector interrupts their engagement party, with the news that a young girl has died and it is somehow down to them. As the play goes on, more and more is revealed and slowly the plot unravels and everything comes to light. It's done in a very masterful way, and I did really love learning about the historical context behind the play and the foreshadowing and meaning behind some of the events. It is a play that criticises the upper class families of the time, and which advocates socialism and social justice. 

We have finally moved away from it now though, and are now doing poetry. For the GCSE, we have to study either Love and Relationship poetry or Power and Conflict. My teacher has chosen the latter and so that is what I am currently doing. The poems range from "Checking Out Me History" by John Agard which is about the way that English history was taught in the Carribean, to "Remains" by Simon Armitage, which talks about the experience of a soldier killing a looter. 

Of course I don't love all the poems, but some of them are fantastic and analysing them has given me a new perspective on the stories that they have to tell. We have a real focus on context, which makes the lessons so interesting because we also learn a lot about history and the many conflicts. I love how power is represented in different ways too, such as today in class we were looking at "Tissue" by Imtiaz Dharker, which talks about the power of paper and how maps, nationalities, history books, religious texts and the like influence us in ways we could never imagine! 

There are several poems that I really do love in this collection, so now I want to share with you two of my favourites: Remains by Simon Armitage and War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy. 

Remains by Simon Armitage

On another occasion, we got sent out

to tackle looters raiding a bank.

And one of them legs it up the road,

probably armed, possibly not.

Well myself and somebody else and somebody else

are all of the same mind,

so all three of us open fire.

Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear

I see every round as it rips through his life –

I see broad daylight on the other side.

So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times

and he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out,

pain itself, the image of agony.

One of my mates goes by

and tosses his guts back into his body.

Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry.

End of story, except not really.

His blood-shadow stays on the street, and out on patrol

I walk right over it week after week.

Then I’m home on leave. But I blink

and he bursts again through the doors of the bank.

Sleep, and he’s probably armed, and possibly not.

Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds.

And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out –

he’s here in my head when I close my eyes,

dug in behind enemy lines,

not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land

or six-feet-under in desert sand,

but near to the knuckle, here and now,

his bloody life in my bloody hands.

War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy

In his dark room he is finally alone

with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

The only light is red and softly glows,

as though this were a church and he

a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

beneath his hands, which did not tremble then

though seem to now. Rural England. Home again

to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,

to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet

of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features

faintly start to twist before his eyes,

a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries

of this man’s wife, how he sought approval

without words to do what someone must

and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white

from which his editor will pick out five or six

for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick

with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.

From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where

he earns his living and they do not care.

I know this is quite different to my usual content, but I wanted to write something a bit different and this is what it turned into! I'll be back next week with more of my usual content, and it will be the holidays for me so much less pressure! 

Around The Blogosphere: 

I haven't had any time to blog hop recently, so if you have written anything interesting or a post you are proud of then please leave me a link in the description and I'll read your post and link it here. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post, I truly hope that you are all well. Thank you for being here and I wish you very happy reading!

Had you heard of An Inspector Calls or these poems? What do you think of them? How are you?

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p.s. casual magic of the day:

(If you are new here and have no idea what I'm on about, click here to find out more)

It's so COLD and also has been very dark in this part of the world at the moment, but there was a very nice sunset this evening, and it was cafe evening, which if you've been following me for a while, is when my local church hosts a pop up cafe where students getting off the school bus can come to get cakes and hot chocolate and sit and chat for a while. It's such a nice thing for them to organise and it just never fails to make me smile!!