Date: Learning question:

What is the tone of this poem? How is it conveyed?

Football at Slack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqQkOxKZrHw

Do now:
Which poems can you link these images to? How / why?
They are not literal…
What is the difference between these two
images?
Anthology: Remains of Elmet This anthology
included photos to
accompany the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nQBcqwipWo poems.

How does this

photo help
you to
understand
the landscape
Hughes was
writing about?
Anthology: Remains of Elmet
How does this help
you to understand
Hughes as a poet?

First published in 1979, Remains of Elmet is a poetic sequence by Ted Hughes with photographs by Fay Godwin. The
work responds to the landscape and people of the Calder valley, the place of Hughes’s birth and early childhood.
Hughes expands on his subject in the Preface to the 1979 edition:

The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For
centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for
refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles, and the upper Calder How does this
became ‘the hardest-worked river in England’. Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region help you ti
and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end has come. They are now virtually dead, and the understand
population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, is changing rapidly. why he chose
to write a
Hughes’s ‘pennine sequence’, as he titled it, presents a poetic vision of the valley that evokes the myths, histories and poem about a
collective memories weaved into this unyielding land and its people. His taut verse and Godwin’s evocative game of
photography do not merely describe but also embody the rhythms, sounds and atmosphere of the area. football?
The Preface and the ‘Remains’ of the title signal that this is a lament for what has been lost, yet the sequence also
reads as an affirmation of the transcendent power contained within the landscape. Hughes held this belief in common
with Emily Brontë, who had also lived in West Yorkshire. As Hughes writes in the Preface, the land holds a ‘spectacular
desolation’, a ‘grim sort of beauty’.

Remains of Elmet is also a deeply personal collection of poetry addressing Hughes’s childhood memories and
formative experiences. Hughes dedicates it to his mother, who had died a decade earlier in 1969.
What else do we learn about this anthology?
Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.

The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men

Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind –

The rubbery men bounced after it.

The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.

Winds from fiery holes in heaven

Piled the hills darkening around them
Does the rain affect the
To awe them. The glare light football players? Why / why
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.
not?
How do you know?
Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy

While the humped world sank foundering

And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under depth of Atlantic depression –

But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air

And the goalie flew horizontal

And once again a golden holocaust

Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.
Grouping quotations
Page 104 in
the booklet

Half of the room will be looking at box 1

and the other half will be looking at box
2.
Find at least 4 quotations for your box
Explain how you your particular focus
is shown through the quotation =
technique

Techniques to look out for:

Repetition
Metaphors
Alliteration
Personification
Simile
Consonance
Hyperbole
Mixture of verbs
Varying stanza lengths
Free verse
Internal rhyme
Half rhyme
15 minutes
Finish the statements

• Overall, the tone of this poem is _________

• The reader is given the impression that the speaker____
• Nature is presented as _____
• Hughes chose to write this as a free verse poem
because_____