Here's a new message from Richard Hoyes, Chief Examiner for GCE English Literature.
August is a good time to introduce Ian McMechan and Jennifer Smith, the two Principal Examiners whose units we’ll be teaching in September. I asked them to present an image of themselves using four crisp sentences. Here’s what they said.
I am currently Head of English at a school in North Yorkshire says Ian (unit 1, the exam). I have worked as an Edexcel examiner in all three English A-Levels, and in various capacities, for twelve years. I have also represented Edexcel on the Advanced Extension Award panel for English. I devote most of my three hours of spare time a week to sport and I’m currently serving a life sentence to Preston North End.
I’m a Glaswegian in exile explains Jennifer (unit 2, coursework). I've taught A Level English for over twenty years, twelve of those as Head of English in two very different schools - boys' grammar; girls' comprehensive. Currently I’m Deputy Head in a boys' school in London where I continue to teach English. My cultural profile? - Shakespeare, crime fiction and Coronation Street.
Now, what image do you have of Ian and Jennifer? What picture do you have of these two examiners gained from what they tell you about where they come from, their cultural interests, their sense of humour and their ability to compose four crisp sentences? And is this imagery?
I ask this for a reason. In September we shall be preparing our students for the Unit 1 unseen and one of the Key Features of poetry we shall be asking them about is imagery. If you’ve seen the Sample Assessment Materials (if you haven’t, they’re on the website, along with some first year schemes of work) you’ll know we gave W B Yeats’s poem Down by the Salley Gardens as an example of what to expect. “Poets often make use of imagery,” we wrote. “Comment on two examples from the poem.” We expected candidates to write a few crisp sentences. We gave them half a side of A4 to do it on and a total of five possible marks.
We have trialled this exercise with current students. What was surprising was their interpretation of the word imagery. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I thought imagery was similes and metaphors. And maybe a few other figures of speech as well – personification, metonymy, the occasional oxymoron. Motifs and symbols might also count, but we could discuss that. What I was quite certain about was that imagery uses figurative language; it tells us about things that on the whole aren’t actually there – they’re the forms of things unknown, bodied forth by imagination, as Shakespeare famously put it. If Ian McMechan simply says he’s a Preston supporter, that’s not imagery. It’s a matter of fact statement. It’s literal language. When he says he’s serving a life sentence to Preston North End however, that’s getting a bit more metaphorical and it’s imagery. He is (metaphorically) imprisoned by his fanaticism. If Jennifer Smith says she used to live in Glasgow, that’s not imagery either. But when she says she’s a Glaswegian in exile, her move to London has become an epic journey, like Edgar’s in King Lear or Grace Nichols’s psychic journey in i’s a long memoried woman. It’s edging its way towards imagery.
Anyway these students writing about Yeats interpreted it differently. Instead of picking up on her little snow white feet, or as the grass grows on the weirs and pointing out the metaphorical contrast between cold snow and natural growth, they wrote in general terms about the pictures that the poem evoked. They saw things that were actually there. They saw a young couple taking a walk in the Salley Gardens. They saw a field and a river. The imagery helps the poem to flow, they wrote.
Barnsley poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan has given me the manuscript of his new book, Writing Myself Home, to be published in September. It’s a poetic autobiography, a modern day Summoned by Bells and it has a marvellous poem about Gillian, the woman next door, throwing out bread for the birds in Ian’s home town of Darfield, near Barnsley. The great thing about this poem is it moves from the utterly commonplace to the metaphorical, a bit like Yeats with the Salley Gardens. Yeats starts in the Salley gardens, a real place, and ends up metaphorical, and full of tears. In this case Ian starts in Barnsley, as his neighbour’s security light comes on. It’s early morning. The bread “hangs briefly in the air / Like snow.” But the light illuminates more than just Gillian, his neighbour, in the present. It lights up the past, the birth of his children, his mother in hospital, the miners’ strike with the “blue light of coppers.” It ends up with the final image of a shirt on the clothesline, waving like a ghost, “a ghost defined by light / Like we all are.”
I like this poem. I tried it our on my year 12s where I teach, in deepest Hampshire. They liked it too. I gave them ten minutes to write half a side of A4, and a few crisp sentences, about its imagery.
“McMillan draws upon commonly known light sources within the poem to enable the reader to form a more vivid picture of what he describes and the imagery he uses to develop images further into his own individual interpretation of the light,” begins one. The trouble is, half a side of A4 has gone already and there isn’t a single crisp sentence. Another is more succinct, if rather heavy handed. “This use of a simile is particularly poignant as it involves a stark contrast in two very different materials. The bread represents routine, everyday life in the area; it is an item which is important to people but is often taken for granted as shown by Gillian throwing it out. Bread is something people use on a daily basis. The reference to snow, however, illustrates something much more rare and special; something people are not used to. The simile makes a domestic occurrence seem much more beautiful and significant, giving heightened importance and glorification to everyday life in this area.”
Good news from Hampshire, then, for the bread-throwing people of Barnsley. But I’d like to hear the poet’s response. Ian, did you have any special symbolic purpose in mind with Gillian’s bread? Is this how imagery works? All meaning, and meaning within meaning? Is everything metaphorical? Does it cross Gillian’s mind, as she steps outside every morning for the bread throwing ritual, that she is taking the common place and turning it almost religiously, transubstantially, into something else? And what would happen if she threw out wine?
In our last A level English lesson at my grammar school in nineteen sixty something, one of the girls asked Mr Lewis, our teacher, “What is imagery?” Paul Reynolds sat next to me and I remember him saying “Good question. We ought to know this,” so we got our pens ready to write down the answer. Twenty minutes later Mr Lewis had just got to the point of establishing the arbitrary relationship between sign and signifier. In a way, he said, every word was a metaphor. He was moving on to synecdoche when Paul looked at me and said. “He just doesn’t know, does he?” I rather think Mr Lewis did know what imagery was, but was finding it hard to define it to the likes of us. If only he’d kept it simple.
Meanwhile, somewhere near Barnsley, Gillian hangs out her washing. Does she realise that shirt is not a shirt any more, it’s an image? That she’s making poetry flow, she’s giving glorification to life in her area, that she’s making A level English essays happen?
But maybe that’s the point of imagery – it’s there without you knowing. You’re in the middle of a metaphor without realising. The world’s gone figurative and you thought it was everyday prose. Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to write about.
Have a wonderful summer.
Richard Hoyes.