1. Revision Starter Change Beauty Politics as a destructive force Time
You have 15 minutes to collect as many SHORT quotes as you can to support a question about:
Change
Beauty
Politics as a destructive force
Time
The value of art
Loss
Nationalism
Disillusionment with the realities of Ireland

2. By W. B. Yeats

3. ‘Why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex’ (Jane Harrison - Anthropologist)

4. Read the first two stanzas
Highlight anything in the stanza that is relevant to gender
Are there any conventional /unconventional viewpoints/ descriptions in terms of gender?
Is the ‘I’ in the poem male or female? What evidence can you provide to support this?
Build up an image of the person being described – how does the poet feel about them?
THERE is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, "Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.'

5. ‘And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth – the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.’ Adrienne Rich (poet and feminist)

6. Rich describes 3 distinct poetic modes:
threaten the mistress with the ravages of old age
The cruel mistress trope, which laments her refusal to comply
The idealization of the dead beloved made fashionable by Dante
All 3 exemplify the tradition in which men write and women are written about.

7. Does Broken Dreams propagate a conventional “poetic” view of woman?
In your answer make reference to at least 2 other poems