First Flight — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
First Flight
The poems
What you need to know
First Flight by U. A. Fanthorpe (1988): a nervous first-time flyer among experienced business travellers, and how Fanthorpe weaves two voices together and makes the view from the plane strange.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Plane moves. I don’t like the feel of it.', 'A sudden swiftness, earth slithers / Off at an angle', 'This is rather a short hop for me', 'I’m doing it just to say I’ve done it', 'Under us the broad meringue kingdom', 'bearing the crinkled tangerine stain', 'We have come too high for history.', 'Where we are now deals only with tomorrow', 'Confounds the forecasters, dismisses clocks.', 'Too cold. Too near the sun.'.
Form and structure: two voices woven together, the nervous speaker's lines and the overheard talk of experienced travellers set between them, with the plane's climb from take-off to cloud level shaping the poem.
Language: short anxious sentences, the earth that 'slithers', clouds as meringue, the speaker's wonder against the travellers' boasting about Beijing, and time left behind ('too high for history', 'dismisses clocks').
Context: Fanthorpe (1929–2009), who taught English for 16 years and then worked as a hospital clerk in Bristol, and whose poems often bring in two voices; the growth of cheap flights and package holidays abroad; and the myth of Icarus, who flew too near the sun.
Compares well with: Postcard from a Travel Snob (travellers who look down on others), Adlestrop (a journey and a pause), Stewart Island (travel that disappoints) and Home Thoughts from Abroad (England seen from away).
