Cover of the textbook Speakout Advanced Plus - Students' Book

The key answer of exercise 2

The key to exercise solutions in chapter 7.2 - More than words for the textbook Speakout Advanced Plus - Students' Book with authors Frances Eales and Steve Oakes from Pearson Education

Question

  1. Work in pairs and look at the short extracts above from two classic poems. What does each express about the relationship?
  2. Student A: look at page 84. Student B: follow the tasks below.

Answer

a)

The first is about how our actions can be misunderstood, or seen differently by our partner. The second expresses the vulnerability that is part of a relationship.

b)

1

  • McGough poem → We can no longer communicate because we completely misinterpret every attempt to heal our relationship.
  • Yeats poem → I want to give you the most beautiful thing I can think of but i have nothing but my love and dreams to give you so please don't crush me / these.

3

McGough

  1. Likely to be after a few years in a relationship (so 30s / 40s?). No reason couldn't be from a woman's perspective.
  2. a) The lines are strangely arranged with each one ending with You or I (this reinforces the idea of conflict and the distance between the two people's point of view); b) the whole poem is written in pairs of contrasting perspectives from the point of view of 'I' and 'you'. There are many opposites to denote the opposing sides in the relationship (dove / hawk, withdraw / impact).
  3. Some of the opposites portrayed perhaps, black and white images. Depends on Ss' imaginations.

Yeats

  1. Sounds like young love, beginning of a serious relationship (so 205?) No reason couldn't be from a woman's perspective.
  2. a) There is a lot of repetition, of: cloths, light, spread, dreams; b) There are some internal rhymes or half-rhymes: night, light, half. light; spread, tread.; c) The first half of the poem is contrasted with the second half: what the speaker wants to offer (the universe) and what she / he is able to (dreams)
  3. The night sky, someone giving something precious and fragile to someone else. Depends on Ss' imaginations.