‘The Farmer’s
Bride’
By Charlotte Mew
Consider ORDERLESS
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Opening
Relationship
Devices
Emotions
Rhythm/rhyme
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Language
Ending
Structure
Speaker
Title
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What impression do we get from the title?
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How might it be significant to the
relationship?
Speaker and Voice
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Whose voice?
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How is it characterised?
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What is the tone?
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What is significant about the narrative being told
from this perspective?
Characterising the relationship
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Consider what we learn about the farmer and his
wife.
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Window side: look at bride’s character
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Door side: look at farmer’s character
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What are we, as readers, led to conclude about
this couple? The speaker? The poet?
Language
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What kind of imagery is created through the
language?
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What is the effect of this imagery?
Are these images developed into extended metaphors?
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Are there any devices being used heavily?
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Other features:
Portrayal
of time?
Contrasts?
Verbs?
Colours?
Rhyme and Rhythm
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Is there any apparent pattern of rhythm?
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What kinds of lines do we have? What is the effect of this?
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What about rhyme?
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How might rhyme contribute to meaning in this poem? (Any
repetition?)
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Rhyme is used extensively - but how? What does it
communicate?
Form
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“Mew is known as an early pioneer of free
verse – using her variant: ‘rhymed free
verse’. Free verse, by definition, doesn’t
conform to a set pattern of line-lengths and
numbers of lines per stanza. Rhyme is
usually associated with conventional
patterns, and later developers of free verse
dropped rhyme, only using it occasionally
to tie-off a poem or emphasise a point.”
‘Sister Maude’
By Christina Rossetti
Title
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What impression do we get from the title?
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How might it be significant to the relationship?
Language
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Cold/deathly - repeated/emphasised?
Why?
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Regal - why has she used this?
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Religious - why is this such a key theme?
Ballad Form - does the poem do
all this?
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A song that tells a self-contained story
Concise - relies heavily on imagery (rather than just
description)
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Can be tragic, historic, romantic, comic
Often includes repetition/a refrain
Mostly written in quatrains (four line stanzas)
Ballad meter = alternating lines of iambic tetrameter
(8 syllables) and iambic trimeter (6 syllables)
Second and fourth lines of quatrain rhymed (a,b,c,b)
Often lots of variation though - yay!