LIT PAPER 1:  ‘Ukritye’ poem Assignment

‘Ukritye’ means ‘shelter’. Why do you think the author chose this as a title?

2. ‘Even the robots refuse’. How does this sentence relate to the last lines of the poem, ‘Concrete and lead can only take/so much. What remains must be done by flesh’?

3. Comment on ‘invisible hail’.

4. What is meant by ‘that upwards cone/of technicide’?

5. ‘Black running guts’: what is being described here? Why is it a particularly appropriate image?

6. What does ‘silent as brides’ suggest to you?

7. ‘Still they shovel … liquid life’: what is being described here?

8. Why do you think the soldiers are compared to children and described as having ‘the wide stare of the innocent’?

9. Why is the word ‘crosshatch’ used in the sixth stanza? What word does it relate to in the following stanza? Why do you think the crayon image is chosen for concrete – something we think of as solid?

10. Comment on the effect of: ‘liquefy’, ‘no deer graze’, ‘roots strike upwards’, ‘puff spores’.

11. ‘Yet Spring still chooses/this forest’. What does this mean?

Form and Structure

12. What is the form of the poem? What is the overall effect of this form?

13. Pick out an example of alliteration, an example of assonance (similar vowel sounds), an example of consonance (similar consonant sounds at the ends of words rather than, like alliteration, at the beginning) from the poem and discuss their effect in the line/stanza in which they occur.

14. Why do you think the words Firemen, Soldiers, State Concrete and Spring all have capital letters in the poem?

Follow up work

‘Ukritye’ means ‘The Shelter’. Write a poem about something else that is supposed to offer shelter and perhaps doesn’t.