Topic Summaries

Annotations

GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Worlds and Lives Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘Name Journeys’ by Raman Mundair > 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

Like Rama I have felt the Wilderness

but I have not been blessed

with a companionas sweet as she,

Sita; loyal pure and true of heart.

Like her, I have been chastened

through trial by fire. Sita and I,

spiritual sari - sisters entwined

in an infinite silk that would swathe

Draupadi’s blush. My name

a journey between rough and smooth,

an interlacing of banyan leaves with sugar

cane. Woven tapestriesof Journeys;

traveling from South

to North, where the Punjabi in my mouth

became dislodged as milk teeth fell

and hit infertile English soil.

My mouth toiled to accommodate

the rough musicality of Mancunian vows

and my name became a stumble

that filled English mouths

with a discordant rhyme, an exotic

rhythm dulled, my voice a mystery

in the Anglo Echo chamber -

void of history and memory.

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