Instructions
In order to successfully express your ideas analytically you must be quite sure that you recognize the differences between 3 kinds of writing:
- Descriptive
- Commentary on meaning
- Critical analysis and evaluation
Look at these three pieces of text and discuss their merits before clicking the Notes button.
From the opening line of the poem ‘Urban Pastoral’, Babette Deutsch clearly doesn’t like the city. Instead of being ‘elegant’ it is ‘domestic’, which shows that it’s not a beautiful, romantic place. This is confirmed when the poet describes ‘pigeons’, hardly the most elegant of birds. The fact that they block what I presume is the river or sea in the distance, ‘hedge the dazzle beyond’ adds to this feeling.
This is better. It’s going through the poem a little laboriously but the candidate is making some points, noticing some ideas the poet might have considered and building on it through looking at the language used. There is some awareness here of implied meaning.