What Were They Like? — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
What Were They Like?
The poems
What you need to know
An enquirer asks six questions about the way of life of the people of Vietnam, and a second voice answers that after the bombing it can no longer be known: their gardens, ceremonies, laughter, ornaments, stories and songs are gone.
How Levertov's question-and-answer structure, gentle images of the past set against images of burning and bombing, and an uncertain past tense show a culture destroyed by war.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Did the people of Viet Nam', 'their light hearts turned to stone', 'It is not remembered', 'laughter is bitter to the burned mouth', 'All the bones were charred', 'When bombs smashed those mirrors', 'there was time only to scream', 'the flight of moths in moonlight', 'It is silent now'.
Form: two halves of six numbered questions and six numbered answers, like an official enquiry, in unrhymed free verse; the answers move from short replies to a long, lyrical description before ending in silence.
Context: Denise Levertov (1923–1997), born in Ilford, Essex, who moved to the United States in 1948 and became an American citizen; the Vietnam War (1955–1975), with American bombing and napalm, which causes severe burns; and her campaigning against the war, including a 1968 pledge to refuse the taxes that paid for it.
Compares well with: War Photographer (civilians who suffer in war), The Destruction of Sennacherib (a whole people destroyed), Belfast Confetti (language failing in the face of violence) and Poppies (loss and remembrance).
