LC English: Tips for Unseen Poetry

According to the Examiner's Report over the years, Unseen Poetry is one of the worst answered sections on the English paper. Because it's a section you can't study for, Leaving Cert students can dismiss it as being unimportant.

But for that reason, the marking scheme is generous. Meaning it's more than possible to score well in this section.

In this podcast, English teacher Peter Tobin tells you the best way to approach Unseen Poetry and gives you tips on how to structure answers that will impress the examiner.
 
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Check out the blog on Studyclix.ie for a link to Peter's cheat sheet for approaching the Unseen Poetry section.
https://studyclix.ie/Blog/Show/podcast-tips-for-unseen-poetry

And for more free Leaving Cert English content to help you excel in your exam, we highly recommend checking out Peter's Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC92KBWQhZ6bpEZe9x62Et3Q

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Below is each of the poems Peter looks at on the podcast for you to reference as you listen:

Poem 1: Neutral Tones

By Thomas Hardy 

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove

Over tedious riddles of years ago;

And some words played between us to and fro

On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing

Alive enough to have strength to die;

And a grin of bitterness swept thereby

Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Walking Away

by Cecil Day-Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

Poem 3: Letters from Yorkshire

By Maura Dooley

In February, digging his garden, planting potatoes,

he saw the first lapwings return and came

indoors to write to me, his knuckles singing

as they reddened in the warmth.

It’s not romance, simply how things are.

You out there, in the cold, seeing the seasons

turning, me with my heartful of headlines

feeding words onto a blank screen.

Is your life more real because you dig and sow?

You wouldn’t say so, breaking ice on a waterbutt,

clearing a path through snow. Still, it’s you

who sends me word of that other world

pouring air and light into an envelope. So that

at night, watching the same news in different houses,

our souls tap out messages across the icy miles.

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