the man with night sweats igcse essay

Cambridge IGCSE Poetry Essay Questions 2023-2025, Part 2

These essay questions are all based on the Cambridge IGCSE Literature questions that you can find in specimen papers and past papers Songs of Ourselves, Volume 1, Part 4.

I have adapted the wording to suit a range of themes and focal points. I’d recommend planning as many of them as you can so that you get a lot of practise organising your thoughts. Aim to write at least 2-3 full essays before your exams, not including mock exams that are set in schools. If possible, get feedback on your essays too so that you know where you’re doing well and areas that can be improved.

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CAIE IGCSE Poetry, Songs of Ourselves, Volume 2, Part 4

CAIE IGCSE Poetry, Songs of Ourselves, Volume 1, Part 4

CIE IGCSE Poetry Essay Questions 2023-2025, Part 1

Essay Questions:

• What do you think is the speaker’s attitude towards life in the poem ‘A Consumer’s Report’? Support your answers with evidence from the poem. 
• ‘The modern world is shallow and disappointing.’ To what extent do you agree, in reference to the viewpoint presented in the poem ‘A Consumer’s Report’? 
• In what ways does Porter comment on capitalism in ‘A Consumer’s Report’? 
• Critically discuss the theme of religion as brought out in Stevie Smith’s poem, ‘Away, Melancholy’.
• ‘The speaker has achieved nothing by the end of the poem.’ Discuss to what extent you agree with this statement, in reference to ‘Away, Melancholy’. 
• Examine the way in which Smith portrays the relationship between humans, nature, and God in the poem ‘Away, Melancholy’. 
• Regarding the poem ‘from Long Distance II’ by Tony Harrison, do you think there is, or there should be, a specific way through which people should mourn beloved dead ones? Use evidence from the poem in your answer. 
• How does the speaker present his own attitudes to death in ‘from Long Distance II’? 
• To what extent does the poem’s conclusion contribute to its wider themes? Use evidence from the whole poem in your answer, exploring the presentation of its themes before and after the final stanza. 
• How does the speaker express his state of grief in ‘Funeral Blues’? 
• In what ways does the sadness in the poem serve as an expression of love and appreciation for the deceased in the poem ‘Funeral Blues’? 
• How does the writer explore the themes of pessimism and acceptance in his poem ‘He Never Expected Much’? 
• In what ways does Lowell powerfully portray the speaker’s anxieties in the poem ‘Night Sweat’? 
• What are the main challenges facing older adults in society, especially those with no close friends or relatives to help them? Use ‘Night Sweats’ by Robert Lowell as your point of reference. 
• To what extent does the poet present a positive portrayal of relationships in the poem ‘Night Sweat’? 
• ‘Turner is able to convey his message through heavy reliance on metaphors.’ To what extent do you agree with this statement? Use the poem ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ as your point of reference. 
• Discuss the theme of life and death as brought out in, ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’, by Charles Tennyson Turner. 
• Examine the ways in which political power is presented in ‘Ozymandias’ and at least one other poem from the collection. 
• Compare what ways in which the poet presents attitudes to death in ‘Ozymandias’ and at least one other poem from the collection. 
• Discuss the presentation of leadership in ‘Ozymandias’ and at least one other poem from the collection. 
• Assume that Thomas referred to the war when writing the poem ‘Rain’. What do you think the broken reeds represent? 
• Why do you think the speaker thinks about the dead as being blessed when the rain rains upon them in the poem ‘Rain’? 
• Imagine that the poem ‘Rain’ was a poem which the speaker sent to you directly by post. Write a response which captures your own emotions and feelings about it. It could be in a form of a letter, a poem, a piece of prose, or a collage. Choose what works best for you. 
• Compare Edward Thomas’ vision about death in ‘Rain’ with Dylan Thomas’ vision in ‘Do Not Go Gentle in That Good Night’. 
• Explore the connection between water and death in Edward Thomas’ ‘Rain’. 
• To what extent does the speaker show love for others in the poem ‘Rain’? 
• Examine the way in which Thomas demonstrates the complexities of the human condition in the poem ‘Rain’. 
• How does the poem ‘Rain’ explore the themes of psychology and the mind? 
• Discuss Wright’s attitudes to memory and the past, as evidenced in the poem ‘Request to a Year’. 
• Discuss the role of parenting and the parent/guardian/children relationship as portrayed in the poem ‘Request to a Year’.
• To what extent do you think that the subject of the poem ‘Request to a Year’ (the speaker’s great-great-grandmother) was a good role model for her children? 
• How does the poem ‘Rain’ explore deeper tension about history and colonialism, via the contrast between Wright’s Australian heritage and the European setting of the poem? (Advanced) 
• How does the poet explore the impact of city planning and the idea of a declining society in the poem ‘The City Planners’? 
• How far do you think the poem criticises urbanisation in the poem ‘The City Planners’? 
• In what ways does Gunn explore the theme of suffering in ‘The Man with Night Sweats’? 
• To what extent do we feel sympathy for the speaker in the poem ‘The Man with Night Sweats’? 
• In what ways does ‘The Planners’ reflect concerns about modernism and development? 
• Based on the poem ‘The Planners’ by Boey Kim Cheng, explain the tension between progress and history. 
• ‘The speaker in ‘The Planners’ feels nothing for his city’’. To what extent do you agree? 
• Discuss the contradictory views the speaker echoes in regard to human nature in the poem ‘The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument’. 
• Write an essay describing the speaker’s attitude towards fellow human beings in the poem ‘The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument’. 
• In the poem ‘The Telephone Call,’ how does Fleur Adcock’s writing make the poem both amusing and serious at the same time? 
• What is the main theme in the poem ‘The Telephone Call’? Is this a common situation in our modern society? 
• Write a critical evolution of ‘The Telephone Call’ in which you show how effectively the poetic techniques have helped you to appreciate the central concern of the poem. 

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The Man with Night Sweats Summary & Analysis by Thom Gunn

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"The Man with Night Sweats" appears in Thom Gunn's 1992 collection of the same title. Often acclaimed as his masterpiece, The Man with Night Sweats reflects on the HIV/AIDS epidemic (at a time when the disease was effectively untreatable) and elegizes its victims, including a number of the poet's loved ones. This title poem, a dramatic monologue , takes the perspective of a man suffering from night sweats as a result of acute HIV infection. The speaker reflects wistfully on his youth, the thrilling "risk[s]" he took, and his feelings of invulnerability before he became ill. Now terribly vulnerable, he confronts his own approaching death and the tragedy of mortality in general.

• Read the full text of “The Man with Night Sweats”

The Full Text of “The Man with Night Sweats”

“the man with night sweats” summary, “the man with night sweats” themes.

Illness, Vulnerability, and Mortality

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the man with night sweats”.

I wake up ... ... a clinging sheet.

My flesh was ... ... gashed, it healed.

I grew as ... ... to the skin.

Lines 13-16

I cannot but ... ... reduced and wrecked.

Lines 17-22

I have to ... ... go through me,

Lines 23-24

As if hands ... ... an avalanche off.

“The Man with Night Sweats” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Lines 1-2: “I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”
• Lines 5-6: “My flesh was its own shield: / Where it was gashed, it healed.”
• Lines 11-12: “A world of wonders in / Each challenge to the skin.”
• Line 14: “The given shield was cracked,”
• Line 24: “To hold an avalanche off.”
• Lines 21-24: “As if to shield it from / The pains that will go through me, / As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off.”
• Line 1: “wake,” “cold”
• Line 5: “flesh,” “shield”
• Line 6: “gashed,” “healed”
• Line 10: “risk,” “robust”
• Line 11: “world,” “wonders”
• Line 13: “but be”
• Line 14: “cracked”
• Line 15: “My mind,” “reduced,” “hurry”
• Line 16: “reduced,” “wrecked”
• Line 17: “bed”
• Line 18: “But,” “myself instead”
• Line 19: “Stopped upright”
• Line 23: “hands,” “enough”
• Line 24: “hold,” “avalanche”
• Lines 1-2: “who / Prospered”
• Lines 2-3: “ heat / Wake”
• Lines 7-8: “explored / The”
• Lines 8-9: “trust / Even”
• Lines 9-10: “adored / The”
• Lines 11-12: “in / Each”
• Lines 13-14: “sorry / The”
• Lines 18-19: “instead / Stopped”
• Lines 19-20: “am / Hugging”
• Lines 20-21: “me / As”
• Lines 21-22: “from / The”
• Lines 23-24: “enough / To”
• Line 1: “I wake,” “I”
• Line 3: “Wake”
• Line 5: “My flesh,” “shield”
• Line 7: “I,” “I”
• Line 8: “I”
• Line 9: “I”
• Line 13: “I”
• Line 14: “shield”
• Line 15: “My,” “reduced”
• Line 16: “My flesh reduced”
• Line 17: “I”
• Line 20: “me”
• Line 21: “As if,” “shield”
• Line 22: “me”
• Line 23: “As if”

“The Man with Night Sweats” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Cannot but be
• (Location in poem: Line 2: “Prospered through dreams of heat”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Man with Night Sweats”

Rhyme scheme, “the man with night sweats” speaker, “the man with night sweats” setting, literary and historical context of “the man with night sweats”, more “the man with night sweats” resources, external resources.

The Poet's Life and Work — Read a biography of Thom Gunn at the Poetry Foundation.

More on Gunn's Life — A biography of Gunn at Poets.org.

A Discussion of Gunn and Bishop — Watch author Colm Tóibín discussing the poetry of Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop.

Gunn: A Retrospective — Read Gunn's 2004 obituary in the New York Times. (Registration required.)

The San Francisco Renaissance — Read an introduction to the San Francisco Renaissance, the post-WWII poetic movement with which Gunn is sometimes associated.

An HIV/AIDS Timeline — Historical context for the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S., courtesy of HIV.gov.

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The Man with Night Sweats

Thom Gunn gives form to fear in a time of crisis.

“When he wrote about the AIDS epidemic and the death of friends, Gunn… made art out of loss.” Edmund White, writing on Gunn’s death in 2004.

Thom Gunn was a British poet, born in Kent and educated at Cambridge, who moved to America to live with his partner Michael Kitay. He would live in California for the rest of his life, studying poetry and eventually teaching in two stints at Berkley University between 1958 and 2000. While in the US, Thom would live through the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s , a decade during which HIV and AIDS went from being virtually unknown to, by the mid-eighties, the most-feared disease on the planet, infecting150000 new victims each year. Little was known about either HIV or AIDS when these conditions emerged, and it was referred to as a ‘gay disease’ because gay men were one of the groups commonly affected. Thom was personally impacted by the disease through the death of many of his gay friends. He spoke and wrote about ‘the plague that cut them off so early’ and his published book of poetry, The Man with Night Sweats , from which this is the title poem, was in part a tribute to his fallen friends, as well as a way of personally coming to terms with the constant threat of infection and death. On top of this, the collection, written by a gay man and insider voice, would become an important way of engaging with wider society. People were afraid and, unfortunately, persecuted and marginalised the gay community who they believed was responsible for the spread of the virus:

Somewhat contrarily though, now that you’ve read the poem, I’m going to recommend that you don’t think about it solely as an ‘AIDS poem’. After all, words like ‘illness’, ‘disease’, or ‘AIDS’ never appear and the poem explores the way a sudden recognition of one’s own mortality can have dramatic psychological effects, regardless of context. In common with many young people, Thom lived his life fearlessly, with less inhibition than older folk with a little bit of experience under their belts – and why not? After all, when one is in the full vigour of health thoughts of ageing, illness, and death seem very far away. But as people get older and discover more about the world’s dangers, they tend to be more cautious, and regret reckless behaviour that might have had serious consequences. Written after realising he became sexually active in a world where AIDS was rampaging through young, otherwise-healthy young men, this poem reveals that no matter how invincible we may sometimes feel, we are helpless in the face of dangers that are too just big to avoid. Therefore, while the collected poems in The Man with Night Sweats are a response to the AIDS pandemic, in isolation I would argue that this poem’s central thematic concern is more simply the frightening realization of one’s own mortality.

To explore this idea Thom presents contrasting images of himself as a fearless young man compared with how he feels in the present day, after he has suffered a profound psychic reversal. You’ll probably not need me to point out that the first few verses switch from the present tense to the past tense and back again, a way of elegantly conveying ideas about the same person at two different stages of life. In the first two lines, the difference between his younger and older-self is expressed through the contrast between cold and heat . In the present day, older-Thom wakes up cold. Dig a little deeper into this word: negative connotations include fear (we shiver with fear, for example) and perhaps loneliness (one can be ‘left out in the cold’) an idea that surfaces later in the poem. The word residue is also an important link between the past and present. On one hand it directly refers to the residue of his sweat soaking into his bed sheet; on the other hand, residue means ‘traces of something left behind,’ much as his present-day self contains the regret-soaked memories of his past. Waking up suddenly, covered in sweat , heart beating fast, and tangled up in a bedsheet is something that most people have experienced at least once in their lives, so we should understand sweat as the central symbol of a chilling, mortal fear that paralyses one in the prime of life.

The fearless, uninhibited way he used to embrace life’s challenges can be seen through other examples of diction ; when he writes about his younger self, he tends to use positive diction such as prospered , meaning he felt like his ‘get up and go’ attitude to life was successful. The poem reveals his sexual journey of discovery without ever being explicit. The phrase I grew as I explored the body and the word adored suggest coming into his own sexual identity. Heat connotes passion, and a world of wonders describes a time when Thom was filled with confidence and curiosity. He used to be robust (strong), fearless and ignorant of dangerous consequences – in fact, when he says risk that made robust he admits that he lived life according to the maxim ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Poetically, the confidence of youth is evoked through one or two regular sound patterns, most noticeably full rhymes such as who/residue, heat/sheet, and shield/healed, arranged in a strong and certain ABAB AA pattern. Complimenting the rhyme scheme is alliteration : a w orld of w onders and the r isk that made r obust use this technique to strengthen the feeling of self-assuredness Thom had in his own strength and infallibility.

Now, though, Thom has changed his outlook. He regrets his flagrant disregard for danger, directly using the word sorry in verse five. After all, several of his friends died during the AIDS pandemic and he has come to fear death, which he feels is shadowing him closely. It’s clear that where his younger self was fearless, he now lives in constant anxiety. Look at some of the words and images presented in the present tense to feel fear and desperation pulsing under the surface. Clinging , for example, has the connotation of hanging on desperately; is his clinging sheet protecting him or is it stifling him like a shroud? Of course, sweat is the defining symbolism of the poem; while night sweats are a symptom of AIDS, Thom himself remained HIV-negative, so this is not necessarily an image of infection. Rather, Thom’s poem reveals a young person who suddenly realises he has been exposed in some way to the danger of infection. Given the number of times he uses the word I and my ( I is the first word of the poem) it’s likely that Thom is using the personal voice . However, we should be mindful that the speaker of a poem is not always the poet himself; in this case, in an act of solidarity with those stricken by AIDS, Thom may be using the invented voice of a young man who has received a positive diagnosis.

His overwhelming fear derives from the understanding that his body, rather than being indestructible, was, all along, fragile and vulnerable to harm. His naïve belief in his own youthful infallibility has been stripped away by the reality of disease in the world around him. In his younger days, he metaphorically thought of his body as a shield , protecting his inner self from harm. Given this is not a long poem, it’s surprising how many different words he uses for his own body: shield, skin, flesh, hands and body itself all feature in the poem. A shield is tough and impenetrable, where skin and flesh are soft and easily damaged. As a young man, Thom felt like Wolverine, able to recover from any injury: where it was gashed, it healed . Now, however, Thom fears that his body is irreparably weakened, as AIDS weakens the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to other illnesses. He says: the given shield was cracked… my flesh reduced and wrecked . The more his fear overcomes him, the more Thom disrupts the established patterns of his poetry, forming the impression that something is wrong with his adult self. These disruptions are especially pronounced in verse five. While the poem rhymes regularly, notice that verse five subtly changes the quality of rhyming words, using half-rhymes instead of the full-rhymes we have come to expect: sorry/worry and cracked/wrecked . Also called slant-rhymes , half-rhymes are created when either the consonant or the vowel sound is the same – but not both. In the words cr ack ed/wr eck ed , for example, the consonant sound (CK) rhymes, but the vowel sounds (A and E) do not. Where full-rhymes could be said to characterise the confidence and fearlessness of youth, half-rhymes sound less assured and not at all confident. He does the same with rhythm and meter . The poem largely unfolds in lines of iambic trimeter , where each line features three pairs of syllables arranged in an unstressed-stressed pattern. The most obvious variation occurs in the two lines ending sorry and hurry where he employs a technique called catalexis to extend each line by a single, unstressed syllable. Here’s what verse five looks like with stressed beats marked and extra syllables bracketed:

Whereas up until now every line ended on a stressed beat (called rising rhyme ), you can see these two lines ending on a weaker, less assured note called falling rhyme . Moreover, the poem begins to employ harder, more painful alliterative sounds , such as plosive B in I cannot b ut b e sorry , and a series of strong gutturals (hard G, C and CK sounds) in the words c annot, g iven, c ra ck ed and wre ck ed . One of the poem’s most subtle effects is the depiction of emotional fear in physical concrete images : sweat-soaked sheets, a cracked shield, gashes and lesions on the skin. The formal elements of verse five blend well with the tactile images to evoke the fear of bodily harm that is undermining Thom’s confidence so profoundly.

Having established his overwhelming fear, the final three verses explore the effect of fear on Thom’s present and future self. The poem links our psychological strength with our physical strength very effectively, asking how much a healthy mind depends upon a healthy body. In verse five, this relationship is strongly implied through the juxtaposition of two lines with identical grammatical structures, creating a parallelism : My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. While his flesh, his shield, is a physical object, its weakening affects his mind before his body begins to exhibit any symptoms. Where before he was an active participant in the world, now he seems incapable of completing simple tasks, such as dealing with his sweat-stained bedsheets: I have to change the bed, but catch myself instead . Fear has paralysed him. The seventh verse presents an extended image of himself frozen in time ( stopped upright ), ramrod straight, hugging my body to me as if to shield it . It’s not really his body that is failing, but his mind, his confidence and that feeling of infallibility. He’s become acutely aware of his own fragility, consumed by thoughts of the pains that will go through me. In another subtle change, this line employs future tense ( will ) for the first time; will is an example of a modal verb whose job is to express degrees of probability. A very strong-and-certain word, will expresses the certainty (less certain modals are ‘may,’ ‘might’ or ‘could’) of pain in his near future – whether physical, psychological or both. While Thom was to remain HIV-negative, he could not have known this at the time he was writing. Contracting HIV would result in considerable physical pain, and that’s on top of psychic trauma and the emotional pain of losing one’s closest friends to the virus. Consider how the phrase hugging my body to me implies that he is completely alone, as if his friends have already gone. In a wider sense, this also reminds us of how the gay community were abandoned by wider society during this time of need.

Thom ends the poem with an image of helplessness in the face of destructive forces that are simply too large to avoid and too strong to resist. The final line features an onrushing avalanche that stands in as a metaphor for the oncoming AIDS pandemic. Thom stands in front of the avalanche with only his hands to shield him, resigned to the knowledge that they are not, and have never been, enough to hold back the onrushing storm. Not only is the image pitiable, but his tone of voice is leaden and resigned, as if he’s had all the fight beaten out of him by the knowledge he’s acquired. Once again, sound plays a huge part in conveying the emotion of the scene. Where the second half of the poem has employed mostly half-rhymes, the final couplet returns to using full rhyme ( enough/off ), giving the end of the poem a sense of certainty and inevitability: the avalanche is coming and there’s no way to protect oneself. And Thom subtly alters his patterns of alliteration and consonance ( alliteration repeats letters at the beginning of words; consonance repeats letters anywhere in the words) too, dropping most of the gutturals that accompanied his images of pain and employing a mix of aspirant and fricative sounds instead. Made with the letters H, V, F and GH, these sounds suggest the avalanche is rumbling closer, and also transmit the strong emotions of the speaker, as his breath is either exhaled or forced out of the mouth. You can find aspirant in the words h ands and h old and fricatives in the words a v alanche, i f , enou gh and o ff .

In other literary genres, particularly tragedies on stage, anagnorisis describes the moment a hero realises the truth about himself, the people around him, or the world in which he lives. Tragedy happens when this moment of realisation arrives too late: thankfully, this was not the case for Thom – but it was for many of his friends. So his poem encourages us to consider how we might act in a world that contains lurking dangers, not always visible, but around us nevertheless.

Suggested poems for comparison:

• Lament  by Thom Gunn

Written after being with a friend in hospital as he died of AIDS, this poem is about how to cope and come to terms with the heartbreaking grief of this daily reality.

• Howl by Allen Ginsberg

One of the defining protest poems of an era, Ginsberg’s poem is, quite literally, a howl of anger and grief at the injustices of the Beat generation. Dedicated to Carl Solomon, a friend who was placed in a mental asylum.

• Hospital Writing Workshop by Rafael Campo

If you read literature to try to see the world through the eyes of others, you’ll love this poem by a writer who sees writing as a tool for empathy and healing. Set in a hospital ward for chronic and critical patients, the speaker reflects on a writing workshop he just gave, and what it means for the patients – and for himself.

Additional Resources

If you are teaching or studying  The Man with Night Sweats at school or college, or if you simply enjoyed this analysis of the poem and would like to discover more, you might like to purchase our bespoke study bundle for this poem. It costs only £2 and includes:

• Study Questions with guidance on how to answer in full paragraphs. 
• A sample ‘Point-Evidence-Explanation-Analysis’ paragraph to model analytical essay writing.
• An interactive and editable powerpoint, giving line-by-line analysis of all the poetic and technical features of the poem.
• An in-depth worksheet with a focus on explaining how Thom used rhyme in this poem.
• A fun crossword quiz, perfect for a starter activity, revision or a recap – now with answers provided separately.
• A four-page activity booklet that can be printed and folded into a handout – ideal for self study or revision.
• 4 practice Essay Questions – and one complete Model Essay for you to use as a style guide.

And… discuss! 

Did you enjoy this breakdown of Thom Gunn’s poem? What was your take on the fear that seems so overwhelming in the poem? How did you interpret the avalanche at the end? Why not share your ideas, ask a question, or leave a comment for others to read below. For nuggets of analysis and all-new illustrations, find and follow Poetry Prof on Instagram.

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Poetry - IGCSE Literature in English 0475

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Resource Plus is a supplementary support for the Cambridge IGCSE / IGCSE (9-1) Literature in English course and is not intended as an exhaustive guide to the teaching and assessment of the subject. We encourage teachers to try out different approaches to suit different learning styles and encourage candidates’ to explore their own writing styles and personal responses to the texts that they study.

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• Understand the meanings of literary texts and their contexts, and explore texts beyond surface meanings to show deeper awareness of ideas and attitudes.

• Recognise and appreciate ways in which writers use language, structure and form to create and shape meanings and effects.

• Communicate a sensitive and informed personal response to literary texts.

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Night Sweat by Robert Lowell - Lesson and Essay Questions - CIE Poetry iGCSE 2023-25

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

9 April 2024

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A range of activities to help explore the poem in detail.

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Songs of Ourselves - Volume 1 Part 4 - CIE 2023-25 - All Poems Analysed

Here you will find a detailed PowerPoint presentation for every single poem in the new iGCSE syllabus. In addition, there is a selection of 1000-word model essays responding to a variety of the poems to share with students. In other lessons, there are model paragraphs, colour-coded for clarity. Some of the poems have a supplementary YouTube video where I have broken down the poems for students to revise at home (more videos to come soon). The lessons have a very wide range of activities to engage students, and most poems have either line by line questions or line by line annotations (or both). This is all you need to be prepared to teach these 15 poems. I have also included a 16th poem (The Bay) that could be used as an "unseen" exam example. I have also made a full anthology for easy printing. Poems covered here are: 1. The City Planners 2. The Planners 3. The Man With Night Sweats 4. Night Sweat 5. Rain 6. The Spirit Is Too Blunt An Instrument 7. From Long Distance 8. Funeral Blues 9. He Never Expected Much 10. The Telephone Call 11. A Consumer's Report 12. Request To A Year 13. On Finding A Small Fly Crushed In A Book 14. Ozymandias 15. Away, Melancholy 16. Bonus Poem (The Bay) 17. Full Printable Anthology (PDF)

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The Literary Companion

Discover the Artistry Within: Your Journey through Poems, Short Stories, and Novels

The Telephone Call

Analysis and Literary Devices

Fleur Adcock

What is the poem The Telephone Call about?

• What is the theme of the poem The Telephone Call?
• What is the structure of the poem The Telephone Call?

Line-by-Line Analysis and Literary Devices in the Poem The Telephone Call

Fleur Adcock’s The Telephone Call was first published in The Incident Book (1986). The poem is about a person who receives a sudden phone call that creates the illusion of wealth and fortune in his mind. However, the speaker is greatly disappointed by the end of the poem, as the prize is merely the experience of winning. The contrast between the idea of winning and the harsh reality cautions us to be careful about what we believe to be true.

What is the theme of the poem The Telephone Call ?

Unpredictability of life

The speaker gets a surreal phone call, manipulating his hopes with false promises of winning a million pounds only to have his expectations shattered by the reality of the situation. Life itself is like a lottery as we are unable to control the chance factors that determine outcomes.

Illusion vs Reality

The illusion of sudden wealth and fortune is created by the phone call. But the call seems to be a scam as the prize is merely the experience of winning. This contrast between illusion and reality proves that everything is not as it seems, therefore we should be cautious about what we believe to be true.

What is the structure of the poem The Telephone Call ?

The poem has six, eight-line stanzas . The poem is in free verse which means it does not follow any strict rhyme scheme or metrical pattern . The lack of rhyme conveys the casual nature of the phone call and also the conversational tone as it is written in a dialogue form between the speaker and the representative of Universal Lottery.

• The poem begins with a dialogue that prepares the reader for the conversation that follows.
• Hyperbole – the description of the prize as “ the Ultra-super Global Special “
• Repetition – “million” emphasizes the large sum won.

The poem begins with the speaker recounting a conversation on the phone with a representative from the Universal Lotteries. In the first two lines, the representative asks the speaker if they are sitting down (an action necessary when the news is shocking) and then confirms that the call is from Universal Lotteries. In the third line, the representative makes the big revelation that the speaker has won “the top prize” described hyperbolically as “ the Ultra-super Global Special “. This line creates a sense of excitement in the reader as well, as they wonder what the prize may entail. The next two lines, reveal the amount of money won by the speaker with an emphasis on “ million ” through repetition of the word. The representative does not say the exact amount won by the speaker, instead the word “ actually ” in the line “ Or, actually, with more than a million ” blurs the difference between the idea of a million pounds and the even larger sum won by the speaker. The laugh of the representative unsettles the reader as it is not clear why the representative finds the situation amusing or incredulous.

• Metaphor – I feel the top of my head / has floated off, out through the window, (comparing the dizziness on hearing the news with a flying object)
• Simile – revolving like a flying saucer (the head is likened to a flying saucer as he is overwhelmed by the news). It is also an exaggerated image .

The speaker continues to narrate the conversation with the representative. The representative urges the speaker to recount his emotional reaction to the news. There is a sense of urgency and eagerness in the representative’s voice to know more as is suggested by the phrase “ Come on, now, tell us… ”. The speaker’s response “ I just…I can’t believe it ”  indicates that the speaker is having trouble processing the fact that she is the recipient of a significant amount of money. The representative replies with “ That’s what they all say ” suggesting a sense of skepticism or even cynicism. It might be that the representative has heard similar responses from the other winners and may be unconvinced or jaded by the speaker’s response. On being further prodded for reaction, the speaker conveys his sense of shock and disbelief by comparing the feeling to his head “ revolving like a flying saucer ”. The comparison is somewhat exaggerated and comical and contrasts with the serious tone of the representative.

• sensory imagery – My throat’s gone dry, my nose is tingling (the speaker’s physical reaction to the news is described vividly through imagery)

As the speaker processes the news of the win, the representative encourages her to express her emotions. The speaker states that she is finding it hard to talk and her throat has gone dry. She has a tingling sensation in her nose and she is unsure whether that might lead to a sneeze or a cry. The representative assures her that it is natural to be overwhelmed as it is not every day one hears that one has won a lottery of million pounds.

In this stanza, the representative on the phone encourages the speaker to take a moment to process the news of winning a million pounds. The representative tells her to relax and have a little cry if she needs to. The speaker expresses her disbelief, as she hasn’t bought a lottery ticket in years. The representative reassures her that their company, Universal, operates a retrospective Chances Module. This means that the speaker may have unknowingly entered into a lottery and won. The phrase “ retrospective Chances Module ” serves to underscore the surreal and dreamlike quality of the speaker’s experience.

In this stanza, the representative explains how their company, Universal, operates “ A retrospective Chances Module” . They inform the speaker that nearly everyone has bought a ticket in some lottery at least once in their lifetime. The company buys the files, feeds the names of the participants into a computer system, and determines the name of the winner. The speaker, still overwhelmed, mentions that she will only truly believe it when she sees the physical proof of the money in the form of a cheque. This stanza highlights the universal appeal of lotteries (another reason why the company is called “Universal”) and the excitement that winning can bring, even if it is unexpected.

The stanza explores the disillusionment and confusion of the speaker upon finding out that the prize for winning the retrospective Chances Module is not money, but rather an experience of winning. The sudden shift in tone is conveyed through the abruptness of “Oh,” which signals a change in direction in the conversation. The phrase “ there’s no cheque ” further emphasizes the disappointment of the speaker at not receiving a tangible reward. Finally, the line going dead signifies the abrupt end of the call and the speaker’s inability to clarify or negotiate the terms of the prize. The poem ends with anticlimax and disappointment.

The Swami and Mother-Worship

Sister Nivedita Analysis The story of the glimpses which I caught of this part of the Swami’s life would be singularly incomplete, if it contained no mention of his worship of the Mother. Spiritually speaking, I have always felt that there were two elements in his consciousness. The story of this part of Swamji’s life would…

Romesh Gunesekera Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and later moved to England in 1971. He achieved an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1991. His literary works often revolve around the ethnic and political tensions in Sri Lanka. “Monkfish Moon” is a collection of short stories reflecting these themes, published in…

An Astrologer’s Day

R.K.Narayana R.K. Narayan: An Astrologer’s Day Summary of the short story: An Astrologer’s Day The story is about an astrologer who uses trickery to make a living. The story takes place in a busy marketplace in a small town in India. The main character is an astrologer who sets up a temporary stall every day…

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Sarah Paulson Dares to Play the People You Love to Hate

The actress has received a Tony nomination for “Appropriate,” in which she portrays a woman who makes a sport out of verbally eviscerating her family members.

Credit... Matthew Leifheit for The New York Times

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By Julia Jacobs

• May 13, 2024

Sarah Paulson still doesn’t fully understand why fans call her “mother.”

At first, when she started seeing the word used online to describe her, she was bewildered and a bit irritated. She was in her 40s and childless. Did these people really think she looked like their mother ?

Once she began to understand it as an age-neutral compliment — a term Gen Z likes to use for famous women they adore — she leaned into the meme, appearing on “Saturday Night Live” last year, alongside Pedro Pascal, in a sketch in which he was “father” and she “mother” to a group of enamored high schoolers.

“How did this happen to us?” Paulson wondered about her and Pascal, a longtime friend. “We were two 18-year-old kids who used to go to Sheep Meadow and smoke pot and go see Peter Weir movies. How did we become the mother and father of children on the internet?”

For Paulson, the answer is a 30-year career that has wound its way from television bit parts to meaty lead roles as fraught real-life people. It is animated by an eclectic cast of characters orchestrated by the television producer Ryan Murphy, including conjoined twins, a Craigslist psychic, a ghost with a past as a heroin addict, an evil nurse and two of the most ridiculed and obsessed-over women of the 1990s.

Paulson has long dared to play characters that viewers are liable to dislike — or downright loathe — and the role that has led to her first Tony nomination is one of her most provocative yet.

In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s family drama “ Appropriate ,” her character is often the one audience members are rooting against: a sharp-tongued elder sister who lashes out against mounting suspicions that her recently deceased father harbored racist convictions.

On a sunny Monday afternoon, Paulson recounted the arc of her career on a bench in Washington Square Park, not far from the rental where she has been living during the play’s run with her three dogs.

“There was a time when I thought it needed to look like one thing in order to be deemed successful,” said Paulson, who, on her day off, was wearing sweats, conditioner in her hair and a few pimple patches on her face. She added: “I thought if you’re not Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, you might as well just hang it up.”

Paulson, 49, never quite hit the rom-com stride, but she has made it to leading-lady status through an altogether different path. Her best-known roles have been publicly reviled women: Marcia Clark, the relentlessly dissected lead prosecutor, in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” and Linda Tripp, the meddling confidante to Monica Lewinsky, in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” about Lewinsky’s affair with President Bill Clinton.

And then some of her characters have been certifiably deranged. She tapped into profound odiousness to play a plantation owner’s wife in “12 Years a Slave .” And in “ Ratched ,” she gave the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” nurse new depths of cruelty.

“I’m more settled in the idea that I have a career I’m proud of, albeit an unconventional one,” Paulson said.

The actor’s character in “Appropriate” is no spoonful of sugar either. Gathered with her siblings in Arkansas to sort through their father’s possessions, Toni Lafayette is clinging to the memory of a beloved parent, despite evidence that he was not the man she thought he was.

Throughout the play, Toni mocks, taunts, provokes and hurls grievances. When her siblings fight back, she ratchets up the volume, the tendons in Paulson’s neck visibly straining.

“The point is to eviscerate so that no one can come back at her with anything because they no longer have any limbs,” Paulson explained from the park bench, before picking up one of her dogs, a small scraggly-haired mutt named George, and cradling him like a baby.

Some actors avoid playing objectionable people, concerned about being pigeonholed into villainhood, or that in the audience’s impressionable minds, their character’s likability might blur with their own. Paulson, for example, recalls that to some of her actor friends, the “12 Years a Slave” role was too vile to pursue.

Paulson said those kinds of thoughts haven’t occurred to her. She said she often found herself simply saying yes to roles she was offered in order to keep working, resulting in a résumé of striking variety.

“My hope is that it creates a path for longevity that is not attached to beauty or age or sexuality,” she said. “When all of those things continue to fall away, maybe it won’t matter so much.”

PAULSON LIKES TO SAY that if her mother hadn’t moved her out of Tampa, Fla., as a child, she would still be an actor, but perhaps at a Disney theme park.

When Paulson was about 5, her mother relocated her and her younger sister to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. Her mother, Catharine Clarke, was in her mid-20s, recently split from Paulson’s father and in an unfamiliar city. She found work as a waitress at Sardi’s, a Broadway haunt next door to the theater where “Appropriate” opened last December.

Paulson attended LaGuardia High School, the performing arts school that inspired the movie and TV series “Fame,” surrounding her with the earnest creativity of young dancers, sculptors and actors. She decided against college, quickly landing her first Broadway role, in which she understudied for Amy Ryan in “The Sisters Rosensweig,” and a small part in an episode of “Law & Order.”

In the first decade or so of her career, she played side characters in the kind of romantic comedies she had dreamed of starring in — Mel Gibson’s assistant in “What Women Want,” Renée Zellweger’s book editor in “Down With Love” — and she landed lead roles in several television series that never quite stuck .

Paulson was nearing 30 when she first started working with Murphy, who wrote her into an episode of his medical drama “Nip/Tuck” as a patient feigning stigmata. In Murphy, Paulson found a champion who would write her role after ambitious role, particularly in his series “American Horror Story” and then in “American Crime Story,” relishing her openness to the instability and experimentation of character acting.

“One minute she’s playing a heroin addict and the next she’s playing Mamie Eisenhower,” said Murphy, who said he considers Paulson like a sister. “She desperately wants to challenge her talent.”

There was only one role that Murphy recalls Paulson not saying yes to: the guidance counselor in “Glee.” Murphy said he wrote it for her, but Paulson had already booked another job.

It was on one of Murphy’s shows that Paulson had what became a career-defining role as Clark, the O.J. Simpson prosecutor. Her sensitive and considered portrayal helped spur conversation about the way Clark was treated in the ’90s by the public and the media, which picked apart her appearance and published a leaked topless photo of her. The performance not only won Paulson critical acclaim and an Emmy, it gave her a level of pickiness over her future roles that she had never had before.

Paulson speaks of Clark adoringly, and she can be fiercely protective of her.

Midway through the production, she met with Clark to express that the show planned to do right by her; the women still keep in touch, and traded text messages when Simpson died last month. (“I didn’t shed a tear,” Paulson said of his death, though she said she did have sympathy for his family’s loss.)

When Paulson took on her next 1990s tabloid epic — the Clinton scandal — she and her movement coach pored over footage of Tripp, seeking to mimic her mannerisms, such as the way she fixed her hair and leaned in to share some gossip, and practicing her walk around Paulson’s backyard pool in Los Angeles. The reviews were markedly less positive than of her portrayal of Clark, but Paulson said it’s the role of which she’s proudest.

The show didn’t exactly spark a mea culpa from Tripp’s critics, and Paulson acknowledges that Tripp’s actions — which included secretly recording her phone calls with Lewinsky and turning the tapes over to an independent prosecutor — were not above reproach. But however misguided some of her decisions were, the actress has empathy for what she sees as Tripp’s central motivation: to expose what she saw as an abuse of power.

“There is something potentially noble in a woman making unapologetic choices because they believe them to be the right ones,” Paulson said.

Around the time that filming concluded on the Clinton season in 2021, Paulson was offered “Appropriate,” which would become her first stage role in a decade, since an Off Broadway production of “Talley’s Folly” in 2013.

Directed by Lila Neugebauer and produced by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, “Appropriate” debuted late last year at the Helen Hayes Theater to critical praise and strong ticket sales. In March it moved to the Belasco, where it is running as a commercial production through June 23.

To prepare for the play, Paulson worked closely with her movement coach, Julia Crockett, who helped her locate the physical dynamics of Toni, a divorcée enraged by the sudden appearance of her absent brother just as their father’s estate is slated to go up for sale.

One source of inspiration for Toni’s expressions was Meredith Marks, a cast member on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” whose verbal sparring match with one of her co-stars went viral . “She’s got this willingness to go there, like, ‘I will fight if you want to fight,’” Crockett said of the clip, which came from a scene that Paulson and Crockett studied. “And there’s something that she did with her eyebrows and her eyes that I really loved. She kind of pulled her head back and had this scoff that we worked a lot with.”

Crockett said she and Paulson have collaborated so closely on her roles that they now share a kind of secret language of metaphors. For Toni, one of the central metaphors of her physicality is a bowling ball that has been hurled down an alley. For a scene in the second act in which Toni is drunk and significantly more pacified, Crockett told Paulson, “Imagine the bowling ball just turns into a potato.”

“And she walked away and did it,” Crockett said.

Paulson’s attention to detail and feeling of responsibility for her roles can be obsessive: at one point, Crockett was living with Paulson in Greenwich Village so they could rehearse in the morning and at night. But there have also been moments of abandon.

Elle Fanning, who originally starred alongside Paulson in the play as Toni’s brother’s sage-burning fiancée, recalled one performance in which the actors realized that a poodle-like dog was sitting in the audience when it started barking. “We just looked at each other and we started hysterically laughing,” Fanning said.

For the Tony Awards in June, the category in which Paulson has been nominated — best leading actress in a play — carries echoes of a time much earlier in her career.

It was during the announcement of that award, at the Tonys in 2005, that Paulson first came out publicly as being in a relationship with a woman, when her girlfriend at the time, the actress Cherry Jones, won the award for her performance in “Doubt.” Paulson, who was seated beside her, kissed Jones ahead of her acceptance speech, something that she later described as instinctual and not intended to broadcast their relationship to the world.

Nearly two decades later, Paulson, now in a long-term relationship with the actress Holland Taylor, will be the one in the camera’s focus as the Tonys envelope is opened.

Speaking from the bench in Washington Square Park, in between waves of giddy recognition from fans passing by, Paulson acknowledged that like many of her previous characters, Toni is not likely to be viewed as a heroine. By intermission, her family has lobbed accusations at her of being “radioactive,” “disgusting” and “sick.” In his review of the play, The Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, described Toni this way: “Think of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people’s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own.”

“Liking” Toni is far from the point. But Paulson hopes that by the end of the play, after learning why Toni is the way she is, the audience feels at least something of a softening toward her.

“My hope,” Paulson said, “is that there’s a fully realized person up there that you can have some connectivity to, even if only for a fleeting second.”

Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs

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