IB English A Lang & Lit Poetry: Example + Try It Yourself Notes

Annotated Example: Poetry

1. Read the following poem carefully. Read it at least twice before beginning your analysis.

Examiner Commentary

1. The poem opens with personification ("The house holds its breath") that establishes a mood of suspended stillness.
2. The image of the dripping tap "keeping its own counsel" extends this personification, attributing secrecy and independence to the domestic environment.
3. The phrase "a language only pipes understand" creates a world in which inanimate objects communicate beyond human comprehension, reinforcing the speaker's isolation.
4. The second stanza's description of the garden as having "dissolved into a theory of itself" is the poem's most striking metaphor.
5. It transforms a visual observation into a philosophical statement: in the dark, reality becomes abstract, speculative, uncertain.
6. The phrase "the memory of colour" suggests that perception is layered with loss, even in something as ordinary as a night garden.
7. The child in stanza three provides a counterpoint to the speaker's anxiety.
8. The detail of the "fist around a bear" is both tender and concrete, grounding the poem in domestic reality after the abstraction of stanza two.
9. The phrase "terrible certainty" is an oxymoron that reveals the speaker's perspective: the child's confidence in morning is beautiful but also, from the speaker's position, almost painful in its simplicity.
10. The final two stanzas mirror each other: "I have doubted morning" echoes the child's certainty, and the closing image of the garden reassembling provides resolution through repetition and reversal.

Try it Yourself

1. Read the practice poem below and attempt your own analysis before using the guided questions.

1. Establish the speaker's relationship to the photograph in two or three sentences: who is the woman, what does the speaker know and not know about her, and what does keeping her "in a drawer" suggest?
2. Analyse the central ambiguity of "one hand raised against the sun / or waving, we can't tell which." Name the effect of leaving the gesture unresolved and connect it to the poem's concern with memory.
3. Examine the imagery of time and decay: "thick and yellow as old varnish" and "a colour the years have added." Identify the device in each and explain what it suggests about how the past is preserved and altered.
4. Consider the structure. The blunt turn "They were wrong about that" precedes a closing address to "whoever holds the photograph." Explain how the final lines fold the reader into the image and what resolution, if any, this offers.

Sample Analysis

1. "Nobody wrote the names on the back" makes the loss structural: the woman "stays a stranger forever," so the poem treats anonymity as its subject rather than lamenting it.
2. "one hand raised against the sun / or waving" is a deliberate ambiguity: the poem refuses to resolve the gesture, leaving the reader holding two incompatible meanings at once.
3. "The house behind her is gone now. The field is a car park" uses flat statement: the factual tone registers erasure without lament.
4. "thick and yellow as old varnish" and "a colour the years have added" personify time: what we see is the past overlaid with age rather than the past itself, which is why even the light "looks foreign."
5. "They were wrong about that" is the poem's turn: the blunt line answers the earlier certainty that "someone would remember."
6. "to whoever holds the camera, / to whoever holds the photograph" is a closing repetition: it widens the address to include the reader, who now holds her, ending on an uneasy form of remembrance rather than defeat.