Where the Picnic was — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Where the Picnic was
The poems
What you need to know
Where the Picnic was by Thomas Hardy (1914): a man alone in winter at the spot where four friends once had a summer picnic, and how Hardy uses short rhyming lines and the contrast between then and now.
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: 'Where we made the fire / In the summer time', 'I slowly climb / Through winter mire', 'The forsaken place', 'Now a cold wind blows, / And the grass is grey', 'As a burnt circle – aye', 'Last relic of the band / Who came that day!', 'And the sea breathes brine / From its strange straight line', 'As when we four came', 'But two have wandered far', 'And one – has shut her eyes / For evermore'.
Form and structure: short lines with two stresses and close rhymes, summer set against winter, a past of four friends against a present of one, and a dash that turns the poem towards its ending.
Language: the 'burnt circle' as all that is left, the unchanging sea against changing people, the city's 'urban roar', and death described gently as shutting one's eyes.
Context: Hardy (1840–1928), the novelist who turned to poetry; the death of his wife Emma in 1912 after years of estrangement, his visit to the places of their courtship in Cornwall, and the poems of grief he wrote for her; and Satires of Circumstance (1914), the collection that printed this poem.
Compares well with: To Autumn (the seasons and time passing), Absence (returning to a place after a loss), Adlestrop (remembering one place and moment) and Nothing's Changed (going back to a place that has changed).
