Topic Summaries

Annotations

GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Worlds and Lives Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘Homing’ by Liz Berry > Annotations
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‘A Century Later’ by Imtiaz Dharker

‘A Portable Paradise’ by Roger Robinson

‘A Wider View’ by Seni Seneviratne

‘England in 1819’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘In a London Drawingroom’ by George Eliot

‘Like an Heiress’ by Grace Nichols

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by William Wordsworth

‘Name Journeys’ by Raman Mundair

‘On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria’ by James Berry

‘Shall Earth no More Inspire Thee’ by Emily Brontë

‘The Jewellery Maker’ by Louisa Adjoa Parker

‘With Birds You’re Never Lonely’ by Raymond Antrobus

Key ideas to compare between poems

For years you kept your accent

in a box beneath the bed,

the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution

how now brown cow

the teacher’s ruler across your legs.

 
 

We heard it escape sometimes,

a guttural uh on the phone to your sister,

saft or blart to a taxi driver

unpacking your bags from his boot.

I loved its thick drawl, g’s that rang.

 
 

Clearing your house, the only thing

I wanted was that box, jemmied open

to let years of lost words spill out –

bibble, fittle, tay, wum,

vowels ferrous as nails, consonants

 
 

you could lick the coal from.

I wanted to swallow them all: the pits,

railways, factories thunking and clanging

the night shift, the red brick

back-to-back you were born in.

 
 

I wanted to forge your voice

in my mouth, a blacksmith’s furnace;

shout it from the roofs,

send your words, like pigeons,

fluttering for home.

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