Active voice and passive voice can be riddled with technical jargon, confusing learners of the English language rather unnecessarily. A simpler version of learning how active and passive voice works is simply identifying the meaning of the words ‘active’ and ‘passive’. Active generally refers to something or someone that is at the forefront of an …
The Kettle on the Boat Extract In this short story, Qissunguaq, a six-year-old Inuit girl, is going out with her family. It is morning. Papa is loading some bags onto our little boat. I ask him where we are going. He says we are going to the other side of the lake. “Why are we …
Explain how the writer creates tension and suspense in this extract. Read More »
To read the poem, click here. Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Remember’ foretells the aftermath of her death on her lover, where the poem starts with the imperative verb and the repetition of the title ‘Remember’ to emphasise on the human’s posthumous desire to exist after death through memories. Rossetti explores a self-effacing love, capturing gestures of …
To read the poem, click here. The ‘Filling Station’ is a poem halved into two layers of life, where one is the external setting which everyone sees – the grimy and dirty filling station – while the other is the internal setting that you need to look to see – the cared for home. Bishop …
To read the poem, click here. Dylan Thomas is a prolific poet with a knack in directly addressing the adversities of humankind, which often pertains the prospect of death. ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ is a poem that reverberates with a resolution of death not holding any power over life, for beyond death still …
Hamlet, here not only presents the overwhelming burden of a man unable to live and unable to die, but also presents the human contradiction in which, despite how grand and majestic we are, we all end up as a dust in the earth; our lives are only transient and never truly significant.
To read the poem, click here. ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ symbolises human isolation, specifically human isolation contrived through the ostracising and denouncement of a hunchback, for reasons relating to both his physical deformity and social destitution. Thomas is keen on producing poetry that looks back to his childhood, and the ‘Hunchback’ is another such …
In the Elizabethan Jacobean period, the work of Senecan revenge drama was interwoven in the English stage, with dramatists often cleaving to the dynamics of Senecan literature, Shakespeare being no different. Hamlet has aspects of a typical Seneca drama braided into its structure, from the existence of a ghost catalysing the requisite of vengeance to …
To read the poem, click here. Seamus Heaney produces an ethereal imagery of nature while depicting the life we live in the modern times, being oblivious of the beauty that lies beside us in his poem, ‘Postscript’. Heaney takes a directorial stance to move through different transitions from nature to our human life, often zooming …
Shakespearean plays are notable for their articulate language and graphic wordplays, as we understand that words serve more than a one dimensional purpose in the plays. Yet, the most foundational and common device that Shakespeare relies on with the large majority of his plays is irony, and through specific types of irony, Shakespeare compels certain …
