Answer either Question 1 or Question 2.
EITHER
1
Read carefully the poem opposite in which the poet expresses his views on elite
athletes, such as those who compete in the Olympic Games.
How does the poet make his thoughts and feelings about the athletes so
memorable for you?
To help you answer this question, you might consider:
• how the poet contrasts the athletes and ordinary people
• how he conveys our fascination with the athletes
• how his thoughts develop in the final stanza.
Dignified
On grim estates1 at dawn, on college tracks,
In rings, in wheelchairs, velodromes2 and pools,
While we snore on towards our heart attacks,
They will outstrip the bullet and the fax,3
They will rewrite the body and its rules.
Athletes who amazed Zeus and Apollo,
4 Rivalling their supernatural ease,
Must make do nowadays with us, who follow,
Breathless, on a billion TVs.
Should we believe it’s us they aim to please?
The purpose stays essentially the same:
To do what’s difficult because they can,
To sign in gold an ordinary name
Across the air from Georgia to Japan,5
To change the world by mastering a game.
The rest of us, left waiting at the start,
Still celebrate, as those the gods adore
Today stake everybody’s claims for more
By showing life itself becoming art,
Applauded by a planetary roar
The gun, the clock, the lens, all testify
That those who win take liberties with time:
The sprinter’s bow, the vaulter’s farewell climb,
The swimmer who escapes her wake, deny
What all the gods insist on, that we die.
1 estates: housing developments
2 velodromes: arenas with tracks for bicycle racing
1 estates: housing developments
2 velodromes: arenas with tracks for bicycle racing
3 fax : electronic message
4 Zeus and Apollo: Greek Gods
5 Georgia … Japan : places where the Olympic Games have
been held
1
Read carefully the poem opposite. The poet reflects on her childhood
memories as she moves to another country.
How does the poet’s writing make this experience so moving?
To help you answer this question, you might consider:
• the descriptions of the home she left behind
• the way she feels about arriving in the new place
• the effect of the poem’s ending
Originally
We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields, our mother singing
our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.
My brothers cried, one of them bawling, Home,
Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,
the street, the house, the vacant rooms
where we didn’t live any more. I stared
at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.
All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,
leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue
where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.
Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,
leading to unimagined pebble-dashed estates, big boys
eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.
My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth
in my head. I want our own country, I said.
But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change,
and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only
a skelf of shame. I remember my tongue
shedding its skin like a snake, my voice
in the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.
Slow Reader
He can make a sculpture
and fabulous machines, invent games, tell jokes,
give solemn, adult advicebut he is slow to read.
When I take him on my knee
with his Ladybird book
he gazes into the air,
sighing and shaking his head
like an old man
who knows the mountains
are impassable.
He toys with words,
letting them go cold
as gristly meat,
until I relent
and let him wriggle free:
a fish returning
to its element,
or a white-eyed colt-shying
from the bit – who sees
that if he takes it
in his mouth
he’ll never run
quite free again.
What does the title make you think?
 Slow? Is he being measured with other people? Comparison?
 Comment on the character
 Expectations from a child?
 Is someone making a judgement about the child?
 Lesser than others -not good enough
 Literacy -lacks an important skill -extrapolated -assumptions are
being made about stereotypes
Who
What
How -techniques