GILLIAN CLARKE: from Collected Poems Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing. Either 5 Read this poem, and then answer the question that follows it: Lunchtime Lecture And this from the second or third millenium B.C., a female, aged about twenty-two. A white, fine skull, full up with darkness As a shell with sea, drowned in the centuries. Small, perfect. The cranium would fit the palm Of a man's hand. Some plague or violence Destroyed her, and her whiteness lay safe in a shroud Of silence, undisturbed, unrained on, dark For four thousand years. Till a tractor in summer Biting its way through the longcairn for supplies Of stone, broke open the grave and let a crowd of light Stare in at her, and she stared quietly back. As I look at her I feel none of the shock The farmer felt as, unprepared, he found her. Here in the Museum, like death in hospital, Reasons are given, labels, causes, catalogues. The smell of death is done. Left, only her bone Purity, the light and shade beauty that her man Was denied sight of, the perfect edge of the place Where the pieces join, with no mistakes, like boundaries. She's a tree in winter, stripped white on a black sky, Leafless formality, brow, bough in fine relief. I, at some other season, illustrate the tree Fleshed, with woman's hair and colours and the rustling Blood, the troubled mind that she has overthrown. We stare at each other, dark into sightless Dark, seeing only ourselves in the black pools, Gulping the risen sea that booms in the shell. Explore the ways in which Clarke creates powerful images in this poem.