The Poems of Beehive

The poems in Beehive do not form one continuous text. The six covered on this page are separate poems by six different writers, from different countries and different times, and the only thing they share is the book they sit in. So the very first thing to fix in your mind is who wrote what. Getting a poet's name wrong is an easy mistake to avoid, and it quietly damages a long answer, because a reader who spots the wrong poet stops trusting the rest of the paragraph.

Here are the six, poem by poem:

• The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost, an American poet.
• Wind — Subramania Bharati, a Tamil poet. He wrote it in Tamil; the English version printed in your book is a translation by A. K. Ramanujan.
• Rain on the Roof — Coates Kinney, an American poet.
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree — W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet.
• A Legend of the Northland — Phoebe Cary, an American poet.
• No Men Are Foreign — James Kirkup, an English poet.

These notes describe and explain the poems; they do not reprint them. Keep your textbook open beside this page, read each poem there first, and then use the section here to check that you have understood it and to learn the words for what the poet is doing.

A method that works for almost any poetry question: answer in three layers. Layer one is what literally happens — a person stands at a fork in a road, a wind blows things about a room, a man lies awake listening to rain. Layer two is what it stands for — the fork is a life choice, the wind is hardship, the rain is memory. Layer three is how the poet says it — the sound, the picture, the repetition, the shape of the stanza. Answers that stop at layer one are only retellings. Answers that jump straight to layer two float away from the poem and cannot be supported. Put all three together and even a short answer looks complete.

A few words you will need throughout. A stanza is a group of lines. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of line endings, written with letters, so that lines sharing a letter rhyme with each other. Imagery is language that appeals to the senses. A metaphor calls one thing another outright; a simile compares using like or as. Personification gives human qualities to something that is not human. Apostrophe means speaking directly to a thing, an idea or an absent person. Alliteration repeats consonant sounds at the beginnings of nearby words. Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates a sound. Free verse has no fixed rhyme or metre. A refrain is a repeated line, and a symbol is an ordinary thing standing for a large idea.

One last habit, and it matters in every poem here. The speaker of a poem is not automatically the poet, and a line spoken by a character inside a poem is not the poet's own opinion. In A Legend of the Northland, for instance, the judgement passed on the selfish woman is spoken by Saint Peter inside the story, while the narrator, separately, warns us not to believe the tale as fact. Write the speaker says, or name the character. It is a small change of wording that keeps your answer accurate.

The Road Not Taken is by Robert Frost. It is built of four stanzas of five lines each, rhyming in the pattern ABAAB: the first, third and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme together, and the second and fifth rhyme together. That neat, unchanging shape is worth noticing, because a poem about an uncertain and troubling decision has been poured into an extremely tidy container, and the contrast is part of its effect.

What happens. In the first stanza a traveller is walking alone through a wood in autumn — Frost calls it a "yellow wood" — and reaches a point where the path splits in two. He is sorry that, being one traveller, he cannot walk both. He stands there a long while and looks down one path as far as he can, until it bends away into the undergrowth and he can see no further. That is his whole difficulty in miniature: he has to choose, and he cannot see where either choice ends.

In the second stanza he takes the other path, calling it just as fair, and gives himself a reason for it — that path was grassy and, in his words, it "wanted wear", meaning it looked as though it had been used less and needed using. Then, in the third stanza, he quietly takes the reason back. He admits that the passing of feet had worn the two roads about the same, and that on that particular morning both of them lay under leaves that no step had yet trodden black. He tells himself he will keep the first road for another day, and in the very next breath admits he probably will not: knowing how, as he puts it, "way leads on to way", he doubts that he will ever come back.

The central idea. The straightforward reading is that life is a series of choices, that we can take only one path at a time, and that the road we refuse is closed to us for good. But read the last stanza again. The speaker predicts that ages and ages later he will tell this story "with a sigh", and will say that he took the road less travelled and that it made all the difference — even though he has just told us the two roads were worn about the same. The poem is therefore also about the stories people tell about themselves afterwards, dressing up an ordinary, half-random decision as a brave and defining one. Both readings are accepted; a fuller answer notices the gap between what the speaker actually sees and what he predicts he will one day claim.

Devices. The whole poem is an extended metaphor, in which the road stands for a choice in life and the wood for life itself. The yellow wood is imagery that also hints at autumn, and so at a life already past its summer. The phrase "wanted wear" gives you alliteration and also a light touch of personification, as though the road itself wished to be walked on. There is repetition of the picture of two roads diverging, which opens the poem and returns at the end. And the title is a quiet trick you should point out: it names the road he did not take, so the poem is haunted less by the choice he made than by the one he gave up.

Wind was written in Tamil by Subramania Bharati; the version printed in Beehive is an English translation by A. K. Ramanujan. It is in free verse — no rhyme scheme, no fixed line length — and it falls into two clear halves that pull in opposite directions. Recognising where that break comes makes the whole poem far easier to explain.

The first half is a complaint. The poet talks straight at the wind, as though it were a person standing in front of him. He asks it to come softly and tells it not to break the shutters of the windows, not to scatter the papers, not to throw the books down off the shelf — and then, in almost the same breath, points out that it has already done all of it. The books are down, the pages are torn, and on top of that mess it has brought the rain again. The tone here is not tragedy. It is the exasperation of somebody whose room has just been turned upside down, and there is genuine humour in it — he is scolding the wind rather as you would scold a naughty child who will not sit still.

Then the list darkens, and the poem stops being funny. The wind, he says, makes fun of the weak. It brings down houses that were already crumbling, doors that were already loose, rafters and wood that were already rotten. And then, in one movement, the list stops being about buildings at all: crumbling hearts, crumbling lives. Whatever was weak to start with is what the wind finds and finishes off. He calls it the "wind god" and says it "winnows and crushes" everything. Winnowing is an everyday image in Indian villages — grain is tossed into the air so that the light husk blows away while the heavy grain falls back to the mat — and that is exactly the wind's work in this poem. It does not create weakness. It only separates the weak from the strong, and shows publicly which is which.

The second half is advice. Having described the damage, the poet turns and tells us what to do about it, and every single instruction is practical and physical. Build strong houses. Fix the doors firmly. Make the body strong by practice. Make the heart steadfast. Do all of that, he says, and the wind becomes a friend — the very same wind, unchanged, but no longer an enemy, because there is nothing left in you for it to break. He adds one last picture of the same idea — the wind puts out a weak fire, but a strong fire it only makes roar and flourish. The poem ends by praising the wind every day, which is a striking place to arrive at after a beginning full of complaint.

The central idea and devices. The wind is a symbol of hardship, and the argument is simple and tough-minded: you cannot ask trouble to be gentle, so make yourself difficult to break. Name these devices in your answers. Apostrophe, because the entire poem is addressed to the wind. Personification, because the wind teases, mocks, destroys and finally befriends. Repetition of the word crumbling, which drums the idea of weakness into the reader before the advice arrives. The catalogue or list, which lets the poem slide without warning from broken objects to broken lives. And free verse itself, whose ragged, unpredictable line lengths suit a poem about gusts of wind far better than a neat rhyme would.

Rain on the Roof is by Coates Kinney, an American poet. The extract in Beehive is short, and it moves in three easy steps: the night outside, the pleasure of lying still and listening, and finally the memories that the sound brings back.

The night. The poem opens with clouds gathering over the stars — the poet calls them "humid shadows" hanging over the "starry spheres" — and describes the darkness as though it were a person weeping, its tears falling as rain. That one image sets the mood for everything that follows. This is not a storm and there is no fear in it; it is a soft, sad, comfortable gloom, the kind of weather that makes you want to stay indoors and think.

The listening. Then comes the pleasure. To lie on a bed in a small cottage room and listen to soft rain falling on the roof just above you is, for this poet, complete happiness — he calls it a "bliss". Notice how physical he makes it. He does not say that he enjoys rain in general; he says that he presses his pillow, in a cottage chamber bed, with the rain directly overhead. The joy is located in one body, in one particular room, which is why it feels believable rather than decorative. Two sound words carry the whole experience: the "patter" of the rain and the "tinkle" on the shingles, shingles being the thin wooden tiles that the roof is made of. Both words are onomatopoeia — words that imitate the sound they name — and they make you hear the roof instead of merely reading about it.

The memories. Every tap on the roof, the poet says, finds an echo in his heart. A thousand daydreams spring into life, and a thousand recollections weave their air-threads into "woof". Woof is the crossways thread in weaving, so the picture is of memories crossing over one another like threads until they make a whole cloth. Out of that cloth one memory comes clearest of all: his mother, as she used to look at her children before they slept. He remembers her fond, watchful face, and for a moment feels that she is present with him again. The way he speaks of her — recalling how she used to be, from a distance — suggests a grown man reaching back to a childhood that is over and to a mother he now has only in memory.

The central idea and devices. The poem argues that the smallest ordinary sound can unlock the deepest feeling, and that real pleasure lives in memory rather than in spectacle. For devices, name the personification of the darkness that weeps and the shadows that hover; the auditory imagery and onomatopoeia that build the sound of the roof; the sustained metaphor of weaving for the way recollections arrive together; and the rhyme, which falls on alternate lines and keeps the rhythm as regular and soothing as the rain it describes.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree is by W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet. Innisfree is a real place — a small, uninhabited island in Lough Gill, a lake in Ireland — but by the end of the poem it has come to stand for something larger than a dot on a map. The poem is short: three stanzas of four lines each, rhyming ABAB, with long lines that move slowly.

Stanza by stanza. The first stanza is a decision announced out loud: the speaker says he will get up and go to Innisfree, and go now. He then describes what he will do when he arrives, and it is deliberately humble work. He will build a small cabin out of "clay and wattles" — mud packed over woven sticks, about the simplest building material there is — plant nine rows of beans, keep a hive for bees, and live by himself in a clearing that is loud with the sound of bees, his "bee-loud glade".

The second stanza is about what he expects to receive there, and the word for it is peace. Peace, he says, comes dropping slow, arriving not in one rush but gradually, seeping down from the mists of early morning to the place where the cricket sings. He then paints the whole day in colour and movement: midnight is all a glimmer, noon has a purple glow, and evening is full of the beating of "linnet's wings", a linnet being a small songbird. Notice that between them these pictures cover morning, midnight, noon and evening. He is not imagining a day trip. He is imagining living there, right around the clock.

The third stanza brings us back to where he actually is. He repeats his opening promise to arise and go, and then explains why the promise keeps returning to him: night and day he hears the water of the lake lapping quietly against the shore. And he hears it while he is standing on a roadway, or on grey pavements — hard, dull, man-made surfaces set deliberately against the water, the beans and the bees. The closing line places that sound not in his ears but in the "deep heart's core".

The central idea and devices. On the surface the poem is about longing to leave a noisy, hard, artificial life for a simple one lived close to nature. Underneath, it is about the fact that the escape never actually happens. He says he will go; the poem never once shows him going. That is why Innisfree is best described as a state of mind as much as an island — it is the quiet place he carries inside himself while his feet are still on the pavement, and that is what makes it survive. The devices to name are the refrain of his promise to arise and go, which opens the first and third stanzas; alliteration in "lake water lapping with low sounds", where the repeated soft sounds actually imitate small waves; personification of peace, an abstract idea given the power to arrive of its own accord, slowly and a little at a time; layered visual and auditory imagery; and a sharp contrast between the bee-loud glade and the grey pavement.

A Legend of the Northland is by Phoebe Cary, an American poet. It is a ballad — a story told in short four-line stanzas with a simple singable rhythm, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. Ballads were made to be recited aloud to listeners rather than studied on a page, which is why this one moves so quickly, repeats itself so much, and ends with such a clear moral.

The setting. The opening stanzas place us far away in the north, where the daylight hours in winter are very few and the nights are so long that people cannot sleep them through. People travel by sledges pulled by reindeer, and the children are wrapped so thickly in fur that they look like bear cubs. The poem never names a country. Most readers take the Northland to mean the far north of Europe, the cold Scandinavian lands, but that is a reasonable inference from the reindeer and the long winter nights rather than a fact stated in the poem, so say so in that form if you are asked.

The story. Saint Peter, travelling and preaching, arrives faint with hunger at the door of a cottage where a little woman is baking cakes on the hearth. He asks her for a single cake out of all her store. She makes one for him, but when she sees it baking she decides it is too large to give away, so she sets it aside. She makes a second, smaller one; that also looks too big to part with. At last she takes a mere scrap of dough and rolls it out as thin as a wafer — and even that she cannot bring herself to hand over. She puts it on the shelf with the others. Three times the cake gets smaller, and three times she still keeps it for herself, which is what makes her selfishness look deliberate rather than accidental.

Saint Peter's answer is the turning point, and it matters that these words are his, spoken inside the story, and not the poet's own verdict. He tells her that she is far too selfish to live in human shape, to enjoy food and warmth and a home of her own, and that she deserves instead to build like the birds and scratch for a hard, thin living. As he speaks she is changed: she goes up through the chimney without a word and comes out at the top as a woodpecker, everything about her altered except the scarlet cap on her head. Ever since, the poem says, she has been drilling into hard dry tree trunks for her food, and country children still see her at it.

Framing, idea and devices. The narrator is careful with the reader. She presents the tale as a legend she has heard, admits openly that it should not be believed as fact, and offers it anyway because a child may still take something useful from it. Keep that frame separate from the story in your answers. The idea itself is plain: greed and a refusal to share are punished, and generosity towards a hungry stranger would have cost the woman almost nothing. For devices, name the simile comparing the fur-wrapped children to bear cubs; the rule of three in the shrinking cakes; the direct speech that lets Saint Peter deliver judgement in his own voice; the ballad form itself; and the poem's work as a pourquoi tale — a story invented to explain why something in nature is as it is, here the woodpecker's red head and its habit of boring into wood.

No Men Are Foreign is by James Kirkup, an English poet. It is written in five short stanzas with no regular rhyme scheme, and it works less like a story than like an argument delivered straight to you. The word it leans on hardest is an instruction: remember.

The argument, stanza by stanza. The poem opens by telling us that no men are strange and no countries foreign. Beneath every uniform, it says, "a single body breathes" exactly as ours does. Uniform here means much more than army dress; it stands for everything laid on top of a human being to sort him into a group — the flag, the language, the nationality, the religion, all the labels we are handed rather than choose. Then comes a double image of the earth: the ground our brothers walk on is the same ground we walk on, and it is the same earth in which every one of us will finally lie. Shared land, shared grave.

The second stanza continues the list of things that are true of everybody. All of us know the sun, the air and the water. All of us are fed when the harvests are peaceful and starved by what the poet calls "war's long winter" — a fine metaphor, because it turns war into a season in which nothing at all can grow. The third stanza adds that their eyes, like ours, wake and go to sleep, that strength can be won in every one of us by love, and that in every country there is an ordinary daily life that anyone from anywhere would recognise at once.

The fourth stanza is where the poem turns and warns. Whenever we are told to hate our brothers, it says, we should remember that the people we really damage are ourselves; the poet's three verbs are "dispossess, betray, condemn". Notice that he never says who does the telling. The poem leaves that unnamed, which invites the reader to ask who gains when hatred is manufactured. The last stanza carries the warning further: those who take up arms against one another defile the human earth itself, and the fires and dust of war insult the innocence of an air that belongs to everyone alike. It then returns to the opening, but with the two key words exchanged: the poem began with no men are strange and no countries foreign, and it closes with no men are foreign and no countries strange.

The central idea and devices. The idea is universal brotherhood, and the poet argues it through the body rather than through politics: we are one creature in different clothing, so hatred between nations is really a form of self-harm. For devices, name the direct address to the reader and the repeated imperative remember, which give the poem the force of a warning rather than a description; the metaphor of uniforms; the seasonal metaphor of harvest and winter for peace and war; the symbolism of an earth that both carries and receives every human being; the heavy enjambment, with sentences running over the line endings so that the argument never quite pauses for breath; and the circular structure, whose closing swap of words suggests that the case has been made and can now be stated the other way round.