Reading an unseen poem — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Reading an unseen poem
What you need to know
A method for a poem you haven't seen before: first impressions, then the speaker, the situation and the turn, then its ideas, language, form and structure, and your own response.
Using the title and the question's theme to find the poem's focus, without forcing far-fetched readings.
Naming a technique only with what it does, and keeping every comment rooted in the poem's words.
A worked reading of Christina Rossetti's Remember, with an annotated paragraph, and of free verse in Amy Lowell's The Letter (1915): how line length, enjambment and caesura shape meaning when there is no regular rhyme or metre.
Reading round your cluster's theme: what to read for, and how to practise on poems about love, conflict, youth and age.
