Peckham Rye Lane — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Peckham Rye Lane
The poems
What you need to know
Peckham Rye Lane by A. K. Blakemore (2007): a teenager on a bus takes in the heat, crowds, shops and colours of a busy South London street, and finds comfort at the end.
Blakemore's South London teenage voice and Peckham's history and people, the free verse, lists and imagery, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The sun, today – / it leaks desperation', 'I take the bus – through Peckham', 'Like salted jellyfish – tentacle pink', 'briny in £2 racks of rainbow', 'Peckham Rye lane is tight / as damp and crammed as a coconut shell', 'punctuated cornrows and seed beads', 'clutching drumsticks like / weapons', 'the pavement is a gruesome meat', 'each person is a sturdy hairbrush bristle', 'Angels gaze from the treetops / like William Blake'.
Form: free verse in short, uneven stanzas, some a single line, crowded with lists, colours and surprising similes and metaphors, and ending on the one word 'comfort.'
Structure: a bus ride through the heat and crowds of the street, from discomfort and disgust to the sudden calm of the angels in the trees.
Context: Blakemore, born in London in 1991 and raised in South London, won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award with this poem in 2007, at 16; Rye Lane, Peckham's main shopping street, in one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the UK; William Blake's vision of an angel in a tree on Peckham Rye in 1767.
Compares well with Island Man (a London location and its sounds), Sunday Dip (a crowded, lively scene) and The Émigrée (a city and how the speaker feels about it).
