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O-LevelLiterature in EnglishPoetryMay/June 2017Paper 1 Q525 Marks

Either 5 Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing. Read this poem, and then answer the question that follows it: Miracle on St David's Day 'They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude' The Daffodils by W. Wordsworth An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed with daffodils. The sun treads the path among cedars and enormous oaks. It might be a country house, guests strolling, the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs. I am reading poetry to the insane. An old woman, interrupting, offers as many buckets of coal as I need. A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic on a good day, they tell me later. In a cage of first March sun a woman sits not listening, not seeing, not feeling. In her neat clothes the woman is absent. A big, mild man is tenderly led to his chair. He has never spoken. His labourer's hands on his knees, he rocks gently to the rhythms of the poems. I read to their presences, absences, to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks. He is suddenly standing, silently, huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow movement of spring water or the first bird of the year in the breaking darkness, the labourer's voice recites 'The Daffodils'. The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect. Outside the daffodils are still as wax, a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables unspoken, their creams and yellows still. Forty years ago, in a Valleys school, the class recited poetry by rote. Since the dumbness of misery fell he has remembered there was a music of speech and that once he had something to say. When he's done, before the applause, we observe the flowers' silence. A thrush sings and the daffodils are flame. How does Clarke movingly convey the impact of her experience in this poem?

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About This O-Level Literature in English Question

This structured question appeared in the Cambridge O-Level Literature in English (2010) May/June 2017 examination, Paper 1 Variant 2. It tests the topic of Poetry and is worth 25 marks.

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