As Grade 10 nears the end of their IGCSE course, we’ve returned to studying poetry, the last “set text” to prepare for the exam.
Poetry is a funny thing. It’s received a pretty bad reputation (I take the blame on behalf of English teachers everywhere!), yet despite the bad press it is what we turn to when emotions need to be expressed. Maybe it’s an “English teacher thing,” – although I have a feeling it’s not – but I’ve got journals filled with really, really bad poetry from my childhood. While my terrible attempts at poetry (what rhymes with “orange”?!?) are certainly not worthy of study, the poems we are reading in Grade 10 are of true literary merit.
The difference is in the takeaway. Poems of literary merit give the reader something to think about – some deeper truth about life, some observation about human nature – but in a succinct, imaginative way, using the best words for the job. By boiling these bigger “meaning-of-life” questions down to what really matters, or what we really think about, poetry is able to give us a new way to view the bigger issues. In the end, these big, tough issues just sound so pretty when addressed through imagery and figurative language!
