The Rattle Bag: A Rattle Bag of Notes and Interpretations
Below are some pdfs and other links providing information on the Home poems of The Rattle Bag for the EdExcel Advanced Subsidiary exam. What is not my own material has been gleaned freely from the Internet, from Google Books, message boards and other sources, to give students a wide range of viewpoints. This site is for nonprofitmaking educational purposes, but if you are a copyright holder and wish to have any material removed, I will gladly do so. Please write here.
I would guess that the Examiners won't set The Ballad of Rudolph Reed as a named poem again this year. As to the aspect of Unseen Poetry they want you to look at, it is unlikely to be rhyme or "sound devices" this time - a possibility is voice (set last year for prose) or tone . If either of these is used for a question, remember to differentiate between narrator of the poem and the poet, and think how the narrator in a number of these poems adopts the voice of an earlier version of himself. (In case you're wondering, a "rattle bag" is a device for attracting deer.)
The 15 Set Poems
These are various Notes on, and Interpretations of, the Poems. Two of the files (Lollocks and Rudolph Reed) contain screencaps and are very large. There are four audio readings (three from YouTube with visual accompaniment), some music written as a background to Piano, a ballad setting of anyone lived in a pretty how town, and an interesting TV appearance of John Betjeman, featuring Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams (!) reading Death in Leamington.
A few general remarks about the poetry selection. These are mostly lyrical poems, with a couple of ballads thrown in, as well as a couple of oddities.
Lyrical poems go back to Classical times, and were originally songs that could be played on the lyre. In their modern English form they tend to be in quatrains - though not always - and often resemble short ballads; but instead of telling a story they concentrate on expressing emotions about specific things. They can be odes (celebrating a person or place, like Aunt Julia), elegies (meditations on someone's death, like Death in Leamington) or sonnets (14-line love poems, like "Mouse's Nest", one of Clare's love poems to Nature).
Ballads came from the South of France and were originally songs with simple musical accompaniment, often with a regular rhythm which could be danced to. In English they have developed into narrative poems - they must tell a story - in quatrains, their stanzas four iambic lines, alternating tetrameter and trimeter, often set to music or capable of being so. The rhyme scheme is typically ABCB - that is, only the second and fourth lines rhyme - but there are no hard and fast rules. The two modern American poems, Rudolph Reed and anyone lived in a pretty how town, are bona fide ballads.
What connects many of these poems is, of course, music: the lullaby, ironically, in Baby Song and Autobiography, or the musical instrument, nostalgically, in Piano, House of Hospitalities, A Christmas Childhood and The Self-Unseeing.