Decomposition — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Decomposition
The poems
What you need to know
A man looking back at his photograph of a beggar asleep on a Bombay pavement, and at his shame in having made art of suffering.
How Ghose's childhood in Bombay and move to England shape the poem, and how its imagery, change from past to present and title work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I have a picture I took in Bombay', 'of a beggar asleep on the pavement', 'his shadow thrown aside like a blanket', 'His arms and legs could be cracks in the stone', 'Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion', 'he lies veined into stone, a fossil man', 'indifferent to this very common sight', 'I thought it then a good composition', 'His head in the posture of one weeping / into a pillow chides me now', 'art of his hunger and solitude'.
Form: a first-person poem of 20 lines, mostly unrhymed, that moves from the photograph, to the speaker's pleasure in it then, to his shame now; metaphors that turn the man into stone; and the pun of the title on composition.
Context: Ghose, born in 1935 in Sialkot in British India, whose family moved to Bombay in 1942 and to England after Partition; the poem of 1967; an outsider's view of a city and the ethics of photographing poverty.
Compares well with: War Photographer on photographs of suffering and the people who look at them; Remains on guilt that returns; I Shall Return on place and belonging; Blackberry Picking on decay.
