Here are some links that are very useful for H1 and H2 students.
Feel free to recommend relevant sites for everyone's benefit!
Your first mission (individual or pair) is a performance task. You are an editor of a poetry volume and you have been given 2 submissions. You have to decide on which poem is better. Have fun justifying your decision! Please post your responses in this blog
Poem 1: "The Convergence of the Twain"
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls-grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" . . .
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great -
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
X
Or sign that they were bent
by paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Poem 2: "A Salute to the Servicewomen
You laid down your life for the country.
You braved the high seas in RSS Courageous
Defying the angry waves, duty bound.
Dressed in white and blue
With service star strapped
And with buckles on.
Unaware of the looming collision
Which made you sleep forever.
You were patrolling the shores
So that we could sleep soundly at night.
What can you do for the country? So asked John Kennedy
You have answered the question.
You put the country before self.
Your services will be written in golden book;
Among the first navy officers in uniform
To die for national cause.
The country counted on you for services
In the years to come.
Destiny has charted otherwise
and you were nipped in the bud,
The born dies.
We take pride in your death.
You have full military honours,
The bugler sounding The Last Post.
Family and friends shed tears for you.
Our sympathies go to them; for, it is said,
Sorrow shared is sorrow halved.
Have fun!
Ms Chia
