My Love Affair With Unseen Poetry
Scroll down for my high-grade timed essay on the very boring (in my opinion) poem ‘Eldorado’ by Edgar Allan Poe
The Unseen Poetry section of the English Literature GCSE strikes dread into the heart of many students. This dread is twofold: They fear they will crash and burn, but also, they fear boredom.
Early in my teaching career, I realised that unseen poetry was my absolute favourite thing to teach. Part of this lies in laziness - it is much easier to prepare a quick, ad-hoc lesson on an unseen poem than it is to methodically work through a longer text with students. A short poem, read and examined within the space of an hour is a low-commitment activity. It’s the one-night stand of the English curriculum: If you love the poem, great! If you hate it, you’ll never have to look it in the face again.
But it was not just laziness that made me fall in love with unseen poetry. For me, unlocking meaning from a poem is as satisfying as completing a tricky puzzle: The victory of spotting a relationship between a poem’s structure and its meaning; the click of recognising a dual meaning of a central metaphor or a title.
The several teenagers I know who are sitting GCSE exams this year are united in their aversion to unseen poetry. Their main objection, one that students often make about studying literature, is that there is ‘no right answer’. They crave the safety of applying a rule or completing a calculation and generating the correct output. And they’re offended by the infuriating paradox that, while there is no single ‘correct answer’, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong. I always try to spin this problem as a form of liberation - there are so many different ways to be right! - but I can see why, from the revision trenches, this fancy-free approach may feel unhelpful.
Students should take heart from the fact there is no ‘must see’ feature in any poem that you have to mention in your essay to get a top grade. Any reasonable, relevant point, as long as it is backed with evidence, will be rewarded. And this is also why I loved marking unseen poetry essays, because two students writing an essay about the same poem might come up with completely different things.
Any English teacher can write a decent essay about a poem they like, so I decided to challenge myself by writing an essay about a poem which I found quite boring and could not find much to say about. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how you can find meaning and make powerful arguments about even the driest of poems.
When I cam across this poem, ‘Eldorado’ by Edgar Allan Poe, I annotated at the top of the page ‘IDGI’ (‘I Don’t Get It), followed by ‘??’. But, friends, never let not liking a text stop you from getting high marks in an essay about it.
Below is the poem, along with the brief contextual information that was printed with it. But before you read it - every unseen poetry exam asks you to answer a question about the poem, so this is the question that I devised for this poem:
Essay question: ‘In the poem ‘Eldorado’, how does the poet present ideas about adventure?’
Eldorado
By Edgar Allan Poe
This poem tells the tale of a knight in search of the city of Eldorado - a mythical city of gold supposedly in South America. In the sixteenth century many explorers went in search of the city, scouring Columbia, Venezuela, Brazil and other areas of the continent.
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song
In search of Eldorado
But he grew old-
This knight so bold-
And o’er his heart a shadow -
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow -
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?’
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied,-
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
I spent about ten minutes thinking about the question and annotating the poem with ideas about adventure, jotting down notes for my essay plan. And here is the essay, which I have typed up to save you reading my handwriting, although I’ve included photos here as proof that this did in fact happen. In typing it up I have resisted the temptation to edit or polish in any way, which was very painful indeed, but I wanted to show the unvarnished truth (repetition and all) of an essay produced in haste.
ESSAY RESPONSE
The poem Eldorado depicts how attitudes to adventure change and develop as a person travels through life and ages. Big shifts in tone between each stanza represent the speaker’s journey from energetic, questing youth, to disillusioned, weary traveller, to, at the end, seeking advice from a mysterious shadow.
Stanza one is the most ‘traditionally’ adventurous in tone and spirit. Traditional heroic vocabulary choices ‘gaily’ and ‘gallant knight’ depict the character as youthful and male - a stereotypical adventure protagonist. The verbs are energetic: ‘journeyed’ and ‘singing’, creating a tone of optimism and energy. There is a sense of confidence in the mission: ‘In search of Eldorado’ - seemingly a belief that this place exists.
However stanza two, opening with ‘But’ immediately introduces a shift in tone, and the vocabulary ‘old’, ‘shadow’ and ‘fell’ create an atmosphere of disillusionment, as if the character has lost the faith and energy seen in stanza one. Perhaps this suggests that the process of aging necessarily involves disappointment and a loss of adventurous spirit. Nevertheless, the rhyme scheme and pace are continued, unchanged from stanza one - which means that the poem retains some of its energy, pace and momentum, in spite of shifting in mood in terms of its vocabulary. The AABCCB pattern, and the repetition of the words shadow and Eldorado to end the middle and final sentences of the stanza do sustain a certain amount of the adventurous spirit seen in stanza one, suggesting that some seeds of adventure remain in age, in spite of disappointment at not finding Eldorado.
Stanzas three and four become more surreal, with the character encountering a ‘pilgrim shadow’ and seeking advice. At this point, direct speech is used, and the remainder of the poem is the dialogue between the character and the pilgrim shadow. Perhaps this is a suggestion that that true adventure isn’t necessarily about finding the treasure of achieving the ultimate prize, but about having the courage and curiosity to ask for advice. At this point in the poem, the character is in a sort of crisis: ‘as his strength / Failed him at length’. This line depicts desperation as the youthful energy is fully drained, perhaps indicating the impossibility of the adventure, and possibly its dangerousness. The ‘pilgrim shadow’ is an ambiguous character, as shadow could either mean someone alive or else a spirit. Therefore this part of the poem could be interpreted as the end of the gallant knight’s life, with the shadow’s directions actually showing him the way to some kind of afterlife. The shadow’s mysterious directions ‘Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow’ do indeed indicate an otherworldly journey. The words ‘shadow’ and ‘shade’ are repeated several times in the final two stanzas, further emphasising ideas of death. Nevertheless, this ‘pilgrim shadow’, even if he introduces ideas of death, serves to re-energise the poem, as in the final stanza the energy and tone of adventure return, with imagery of distant and far-flung travel (‘Over the Mountains’ / ‘Down the Valley’) and a courageous and bold tone, with his active imperatives to ‘Ride, boldly ride’ and the emphatic exclamation after the final word ‘Eldorado!’
Ending in this way, in spite of the morbid figure of the shadow, seems to imply that the spirit of adventure remains alive in spite of setbacks and disappointment.
The fact that the directions given by the shadow are plainly impossible - travelling on the moon and into the ambiguous ‘valley of the shadow’ is perhaps a way of admitting that Eldorado does not exist and can never be found. But in spite of the failure of this knight’s adventurous ambition, this poem is not dismissing or belittling youthful adventure. It celebrates the way attitudes to adventure shift during a person’s life, and can be seen as paying tribute to human perseverance and optimism in the fate of inevitable death.
Evaluation:
Other teachers reading may disagree with me (feel free to say so in the comments!), but I would assess this as being a grade 8 or 9 response.
This essay would get marks for engaging with language and structure by commenting on:
Tone shifts
Vocabulary choices (identifying stereotypes within these)
Energetic verbs
Rhyme scheme and pace
Repetition
Direct speech
Ambiguity / alternative interpretations
Identifying a ‘crisis’ point in the poem
Imagery
Imperatives
Exclamatory tone
Throughout the essay, I connected my arguments to ‘adventure’ to ensure that I was engaging with the question, and my conclusion offers an interpretation about the overall presentation of the idea of adventure in the poem.
Please note that I have not so much as mentioned simile, metaphor, alliteration or enjambment. - I have nothing against these features, and many strong essays will comment on such techniques, but I have found that students are sometimes so determined to discuss a simile or metaphor that they will cling to a fairly boring one and waste a lot of time on it, at the expense of other, more interesting things to explore.
In conclusion:
Do I love this poem? No
Do I love this essay? No
Would it get a high mark in a GCSE exam? Yes
If you have found this at all helpful or if you have any questions about unseen poetry in general please do ask me in the comments and I’ll get back to you.