Stewart Island — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Stewart Island
The poems
What you need to know
Stewart Island by Fleur Adcock (1971): a mother's unhappy stay on a remote New Zealand island, and how Adcock uses a conversational voice, irony and a flat, surprising last line.
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: 'But look at all this beauty', 'said the hotel manager’s wife', 'when asked how she could bear to / live there', 'True: there was a fine bay', 'all hills and atmosphere', 'fishermen with Scottish names', 'it was too cold to swim', 'and was bitten by sandflies', 'a mad seagull jetted down', 'I had already / decided to leave the country.'.
Form and structure: one block of unrhymed lines in a chatty voice, sentences that run across line ends, a bracketed piece of gossip, a list of small disasters and a flat final sentence that changes how the whole poem reads.
Language: the brochure view of the island ('fine bay', 'white / sand') undercut by cold, sandflies and a 'mad seagull', and irony in the wife's 'beauty'.
Context: Adcock (1934–2024), born in New Zealand and partly raised in England, who returned to England for good in 1963; the poem in High Tide in the Garden (1971), her first to name New Zealand places; and Stewart Island (Rakiura), the remote, thinly peopled southernmost inhabited island of New Zealand.
Compares well with: Postcard from a Travel Snob (a holiday place seen with irony), Home Thoughts from Abroad (opposite feelings about a homeland), Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan (belonging to two countries) and I started Early – Took my Dog (a hostile shore).
