Aberdare Boys’ Grammar School

Academic Activities

English Literature in Form 5, 1961-62

from Colin Rees

English Literature took place in Room 10, taught by Garfield Griffiths (Gaffer). Over the previous summer holiday we had been set homework that involved learning by heart several poems, and several speeches from Henry V. Woe betide anybody who could not stand up and recite the specified lines!

Lessons started on September 5^th, or at least they did for 5A. After a very brief introduction to the difference between the Italian and English sonnet, we plunged into a considerable amount of note-taking whereby Gaffer required us to scribble down at great speed explanations of the poems, plays and novels. We studied them line-by-line with explanations given to us about words, events and places that the writers were using in their works.

The style of lesson was one that few of us had experienced previously; very little was written on the board except when spelling had to be made clear. Looking back now, I realise that this style was close to what I later experienced at university.

Below is a list of what we covered in the year that led up to O levels.

Poetry (from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury)

Poet	Title	Ref. No. in Anthology
Milton	On the late massacre in Piedmont	64
	On His Blindness	71
	At a Solemn Music	115
Wordsworth	The Education of Nature	179
	The Same	213
	Upon Westminster Bridge	245
	The Reaper	250
	By the Sea	261
	To Sleep	266
Keats	On first looking into Chapman’s Homer	166
	Ode on the Poets	167
	Ode to a Nightingale	244
	Ode to Autumn	255
Arnold	Shakespeare	365
	The Future	368
	Philomela	369
	Requiescat	370
Yeats	Lake Isle of Innisfree	413
	The Folly of being Comforted	414
	A Prayer for my Son	434
	From the ‘Antigone’	439

Plays
Shakespeare Henry V
Sheridan The Rivals

Novel
Hardy Under the Greenwood Tree

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