Songs Of Ourselves

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS

AS LITERATURE IN ENGLISH : SYLLABUS 9695

NOTES FOR TEACHERS ON POEMS SET FOR STUDY FROM SONGS OF OURSELVES: THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY IN ENGLISH FOR EXAMINATION IN JUNE AND NOVEMBER 2007, 2008, AND 2009

CONTENTS Introduction: How to use these Notes 1. Sujata Bhatt: A Different History 2. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty 3. Allen Curnow: Continuum 4. Judith Wright: Hunting Snake 5. Christina Rossetti: A Birthday 6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Woodspurge 7. Kevin Halligan: The Cockroach 8. Margaret Atwood:The City Planners 9. Boey Kim Cheng: The Planners 10. Norman MacCaig: Summer Farm 11. Elizabeth Brewster WhereI Come From 12. William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge 13. James K Baxter: The Bay 14. Arthur Hugh Clough: Where Lies the Land 15. Les Murray: Morse 16. Thom Gunn: The Man with Night Sweats 17. Robert Lowell: Night Sweat 18. Edward Thomas: Rain 19. William Cosmo Monkhouse: Any Soul to Any Body 20. Anne Stevenson: The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument 21. Tony Harrison: From Long Distance 22. George Meredith: From Modern Love 23. Walt Whitman:From Song of Myself 24. Thomas Hardy: He Never Expected Much 25. Fleur Adcock: The Telephone Call 26. Peter Porter: A Consumer’s Report 27. Charles Tennyson Turner: On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book 28. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias 29. Stevie Smith: Away Melancholy

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These notes are intended to give some background information on each poet and/or poem as an aid to further research and to stimulate discussion in the classroom. They are intended only as a starting point and are no substitute for the teacher’s and student’s own study and exploration of the poems. A suggested poem for comparison is given for each set poem, from this selection, from the wider anthology Songs of Ourselves (shown by ‘SOO’) or from elsewhere, (in which case the poem or a link is provided within the...