FIVE POEMS ELA 30-1

FIVE POEMS
ELA 30-1
the poems
PAGE
TITLE
POET
10
"Guilt"
Leona Gom
19
"Field of Vision"
Seamus Heaney
20
"Where There's A Wall"
Joy Kogawa
33
"The Uninvited"
Dorothy Livesay
41
"Refugee Mother and Child"
Chinua Achebe
Guilt – Leona Gom
your mother giving you a set of dishes
and all you said was but I move around
so much and you can never forget
her hurt face turning away.
the best friend you accused of
flirting with your boyfriend when
all the time you knew it was him
you just couldn’t face it.
the argument with your father about
not having seen his damned magazine
then finding it in your room
and never admitting it.
telling your office mate you
agreed with her motion then
voting with the others after all.
thousands of them, little knots
you can’t shake loose from your memory
it’s too late now to say you’re sorry.
they contract along your nerves
to consciousness, whenever you think
you are not a bad person, there
they come, little lumps of guilt
making their daily rounds,
like doctors, keeping you sick.
“Guilt” – Leona Gom
 1. What are the sources of the narrator’s guilt?
 2. Explain the significance of the poem’s title.
 3. What metaphors does Gom use to describe guilt in
stanza two of her poem? Why do you think the author
chose these metaphors?
Field of Vision – Seamus Heaney
I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.
Straight out past the RV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to
wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same
mountain.
She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the
chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.
Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate –
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you
could see
Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept
standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.
Where There’s a Wall – Joy Kogawa
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
a ladder perhaps and a
sentinel who sometimes sleeps.
There are secret passwords you
can overhear. There are methods
of torture for extracting clues
to maps of underground passages.
There are zeppelins, helicopters,
rockets, bombs, battering rams,
armies with trumpets whose
all at once blast shatters
the foundations.
Where there’s a wall there are
words to whisper by loose bricks,
wailing prayers to utter, birds
to carry messages taped to their feet.
There are letters to be written –
poems even.
Faint as in a dream
is the voice that calls
from the belly
of the wall.
“Field of Vision” – Seamus Heaney
“Where There’s a Wall” – Joy Kogawa
 1. After a close reading of both poems, explain the
thematic connection between the two. Refer to specific
evidence from the poems to support your interpretation.
 2. Analyze the significance of each poem’s title. Support
your analysis with reference to the poems.
Heaney and Kogawa continued
 3. Kogawa employs parallel structure and repetition of
“Where there’s a wall” and “there’s” or “there are” in her
poem. What might her purpose be in repeating “Where
there’s a wall” only twice, while following these lines with
seven phrases beginning with “there is” or “there are”?
 4. a) What techniques does Heaney use in his poem to
create the sense of time passing slowly?

b) What kind of diction and imagery does Heaney use
to describe the woman who is the protagonist of his
poem? What can you infer about the woman from the
diction and imagery?
The Uninvited – Dorothy Livesay
Always a third one’s there
where any two are walking out
along a river-bank so mirror-still
sheathed in sheets of sky
pillows of cloud -their footprints crunch the hardening earth
their eyes delight in trees stripped clean
winter-prepared
with only the rose-hips red
and the plump fingers of sumach
And always between the two
(scuffing the leaves, laughing
and fingers locked)
goes a third lover his or hers
who walked this way with one or other
once
flung back the head snapped branches of
dark pine
in armfuls before snowfall
I walk beside you
trace
a shadow’s shade
skating on silver
hear
another voice
singing under ice
“The Uninvited” – Dorothy Livesay
 1. a) Who are “the uninvited”? What other nouns and
adjectives are used in the poem to describe “the
uninvited”? What impression do these words create?

b) Why are the uninvited “always” there?
 2. To whom does the pronoun “their” in “their footprints”
(line 6) and in “their eyes” (line 7) refer?
“The Uninvited” – continued
 3. a) The narrator uses third-person pronouns in stanzas
one and two, but in stanza three, she switches to the firstperson pronoun and point of view. The reader then
realizes that all along, she was describing a personal
situation. Identify the third-person pronouns in stanzas
one and two. What is the effect of having a narrator
describe her own situation from the third-person point of
view?

b) What does the switch to the first-person pronouns
in the last stanza reveal about the narrator?
“The Uninvited” – still continued
 4. a) How does Livesay create a sense of mystery at the
beginning of the poem?

b) The dash at the end of the fifth line in the poem can
be seen as a kind of turning point. How do the words and
images before this point compare with those following it?
Explain how this change foreshadows the ending of the
poem.
 5. What is the theme of this poem?
Refugee Mother and Child – Chinua Achebe
No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most
mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –
singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it . . . In another life this
would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
"Refugee Mother and Child" - Chinua Achebe
 1. What images in this poem suggest death? How does
the poet create images of life to imply a sense of life-indeath?
 2. Explore the connotations of the reference to the
Madonna and Child. What emotions might the two
images of motherhood share?
 3. What is the effect of the absence of sound in the
poem? Given this absence, what might the image
“singing in her eyes” mean?
"Madonna and Child" c.1503 – Raphael
 In some forms of Christianity, the Madonna is
the sacred representation of the archetypal
female experience of motherhood. The allusion
in the poem carries the idea of reverence for
maternal devotion. The mother wistfully cares
for “a son she soon would have to forget”
because the child will die.
 Artistic representations of the Christian
Madonna usually show her in contemplative
poses suggesting stillness and sorrow at the
foreknowledge of her child’s death. The African
mother and the Christian Madonna share the
sheltering, sustaining emotions of motherhood
and the sorrow in the inevitable loss of a child.
By suggesting a kinship between the mother and
the Madonna, the speaker enlarges the frame of
reference in order to convey the fortitude of the
suffering mother, linking her to a representation
of motherhood itself.
"Refugee Mother and Child" - continued
 4. In the first and last sentences of the poem, the
speaker implies a commentary on the scene he or she is
describing. What values and attitudes lie behind the
speaker’s responses to seeing this mother and her child?
What responses do the speaker’s comments evoke from
the reader?