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Having been brought up speaking English, most of our Second Level students should be well placed to successfully take the Higher Level Paper. There are a number of reasons why this does not happen as it should:
Our Grinds are aimed at rectifying these shortcomings and thereafter to practise our students in their newly developed skills.
BELOW: Find some examples of our work with students in aspects of Higher Level Literature
What is revealed in the poetry of Sylvia Plath is the vivid portrait of a tormented and anguished person (Mick Beirne)
Sylvia Plath suffers for her sanity like other sensitive artists who feared that they would in time be betrayed by what they loved. John Keats feared that he would die “before his pen had gleaned his teaming brain”; Sylvia Plath feared that her muse would fail her while she lived. Thus she refers to “total neutrality”, and this means an absence of inspiration to write. This produces a terrible anxiety as she awaits the next “miracle” and seeks “back talk from the sky”. Yet, as long as a black rook can inspire her on a rainy day, because of how the light is playing spasmodic tricks of radiance upon its feathers, the miracle is always about; though she may not have grasped this assurance. Her season of fatigue and her long wait are part of her own innate fear of ultimate failure: ironically, this might well have produced an earlier fatal sequel ─ were it not for the help of her fickle muse.
Within the “Bee Box” there is something suppressed; an awareness caused to become angry; something scary that nevertheless draws her towards it incessantly like a great magnet; some dark power that may be released with potential dreadful consequences. The subject matter is perhaps metaphorical: the torrent is within the confines of her own head as much as it is within the bee cage; the great magnet is her Muse and the darkness is what she has camouflaged until now ─ for the gentle hearted might not like it. So she can nurture these things for future release or let them decay. If she releases the power of her caged awareness it may cause unforeseen hurt. “I am no source of honey”, she says: so neither bees nor people may expect too much flower-like sweetness from her; thus neither can feel cheated by a new revelation. So then, she has power: the power to grant freedom to both the bees and to her own art-crazed thoughts ─ thus she is like God, where being sweet equals delivering some fulfilment. Tomorrow, she promises, she will deliver!
Perhaps Plath should be best seen as having been married to her muse to whom she bears a family of poems ─ which alone fulfil her intuition. In morning Song we see her innate fear of and alienation to human motherhood: her baby is “a fat golden watch”, and later its mouth is like that of a cat. Then, at best, it is the sound of the sea in its breathing: but the sea has as much potential to be dangerous as beautiful ─ for it may drown those that engage with it! She herself is a milch cow and the light of day swallows the dull stars. She and her baby will become as alien to one another as the passing cloud that condenses a pool of water and then loses its former shape. As a mother, Plath is full of insecurity so that her baby’s nakedness only bares her own inefficiencies for her new role.
The terrible truth within the theme of the poem “Child” is that, whereas the innocence and imagination of the child should be a source of emotional inspiration to the mother, it only reflects all the more on her emptiness and inability to relate to joy. Thus the little child ponders on the beauty of “The zoo of the new” Even words as well as shapes and colours bear it magic. In contrast its mother sees only “this dark Ceiling without a star”
The poem “Poppies” presents even a more gruesome affair; for the poet can not experience any emotion at all ─ not even pain. This presents a fearsome prospect that she would gladly suffer physical trauma rather than live within her current state of inertia: “If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!” The flickering of the poppies in the breeze only serves to exhaust her; but she is somewhat excited by the imagery of violence which she beholds in their colour:
“A mouth just blooded.
Little bloody skirts!”
She is close to breakdown now and simply wants to get out, she thinks: “If I could bleed or sleep”
The “Mirror” is no sweet god: but the woman who visits it daily wants it to produce miracles. However, it unapologetically tells the truth and does not requite her supplications when she comes to it for comfort: thus it is insensitive and mean, but faithful to fact. And that fact is that the lady grows steadily older and is not a “Snow white”. Then the mirror undergoes a terrible metamorphoses becoming a lake into which the woman has gone as a young girl, only to emerge as a self-scaring and terrible fish. Thus Plath illustrates the importunate nature of her gender: needing and not getting reassurance, losing beauty with inevitable age and ultimately frightened by a future of helpless decline. Such is also of course common to the male of our species: but Plath writes here only for her own.
Plath is an endearing poet, full of the wonder of nature’s mysteries, full of human fears of failure and decline, but lulling us with poetic beauty to enjoy her sorrow. She is the rare sensitive pheasant on the elm hill trailing its tail in the winter snow; she is the mad bee box full of energetic trouble; she is the black rook in rainy weather waiting for the random descent of light upon its dullness that will radiate its hidden beauty; she is the paradoxical morning song for her baby that is so much a mourning song for freedom; she is the “zoo of the new” in which her child can meditate wonder and so become wise ─ but she does not know it; she is the lady at the mirror of art drowning in her own dreams and discovering a nightmare; and she is unfortunately and ultimately the bloody poppy that will produce its own dulling opiates to forever still her fear and pain and her irreplaceable poetry.
GOOD AND EVIL IN THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR {Mick Beirne}
It was a time of social upheaval: people were being driven out on to the heath and the wilderness by the greed and enterprise of the “enclosure movement It was a time when preachers arose among the common people to presage the wrath of God upon the English nation as it turned towards a new materialistic agenda.
Good is represented by loyalty to the traditional bonds of family and state, coupled with a concern for the welfare of society. Evil is associated with an extreme pre-occupation with self advancement and an outright rejection of the bonds of kinship; coupled with a perverse indulgence in savage cruelty. Cordelia, Kent and Edgar epitomise goodness; Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Oswald and Edmond are set to represent the opposite: though, if I were a judge in a court of trial, I would be reluctant to so condemn the latter.
Cornwall is by nature an evil coward. He is only brave when he is backed up by Regan and Goneril. In blinding Gloucester, he performs the cruellest deed in the entire affair, and he appears to enjoy cruelty; thus is adamant that Lear should be sent out into the storm and on to the heath.
Yet Regan and Goneril are more evil still.: they repudiate the natural bonds of fidelity between daughter and father and are bereft of any vestige of feminine kindness. They swear false love to their father and then diminish that to the number of knights that he may keep in his attendance. They operate rationality and not on passion when dealing with their kindred; yet ironically it is through passion for Edmond that they both ultimately perish. Both display inveterate cruelty when dealing with Gloucester; indeed Goneril is the worst woman that Shakespeare ever set on stage -- for there is no end to how far in villainy she will go to fulfil her desires. She also stronger in resolution and deeper in vileness than Regan: thus she knows that blinding is a lasting torment to the victim, while hanging only hurts horribly for a short while. She also considers a rat’s death as being a fitting farewell to her sister.
Despite his perverse exploitation of people for self-advantage, it is simplistic to define Edmond as evil. He has been banished abroad merely because he is illegitimate. Gloucester tells Kent: “He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.” Later Edmond prays: “Now gods, stand up for bastards” His problem is that bitter life has taught him selfishness as a means for survival His fault is that he takes it too far.
Love itself is fundamental to goodness. It is not merely an emotional feeling: it inspires the performance of duties of care, bondage and obligation to kindred and state. Thus Cordelia tells her father: “I love your Majesty according to my bond.”
it involves unquestioned loyalty and self-sacrifice. Thus, when Albany enquires from Edgar as to how he has known his father’s miseries, he replies: “By nursing them, My Lord”
love is a virtue that enlightens all who possess it to operate a loyal service to those to whom they are attached. Thus Kent tells Lear: “I am the very man that from your first of difference and decay has followed your sad steps”
Lear is a tragic hero who has potential for goodness: however this better aspect of his being has been eclipsed by the corruptions of power -- so that he no longer knows love. Thus he must suffer in order to purge himself of his flaws of selfishness and unkindness: in this way the fate of the King represents a Christian hope that the suffering and sacrifices of the innocent ─ like Cordelia ─ can redeem us from the dangers of innate human ugliness.
This drama does not give us the happy ending that we desire; yet we may learn from identifying such horrors that our society is in need of repair This is likely to have been Shakespeare’s message to his own monarch during his time.