On The Train

On the Train contrasts the everyday, "Darling, I'm on the train", that overused sentence you hear all the time from people on their mobiles, calling to tell wife or boyfriend that they are on their way home, with the horror of the Paddington rail crash, and the people who would never see their homes again, whose phones "ring in the rubble" while "wolves howl into silent telephones."

GillianClarke mentions 9/11 in the Q&A about this poem on her website, and there is something dreadful about the idea of mobiles still ringing after their owners are dead.
There is a useful analysis of the poem here.

When answering a question about this poem, I wouldn't spend too much time on 9/11, but if you make a reference to Clarke's own comment on her site, and share your own thoughts on the way mobile phones are used, you will be working towards an A/A* grade because you are showing that you are making connections, and setting the poem in a social context.

If I were going to compare this to one of the pre 1914 poems, I might compare it to On My First Sonne as it deals with mortality, and with love of family. Any other ideas? Which Seamus Heaney poem could you use as contrast to this?

On My First Sonne

I think you can link this with any one of several poems in the Anthology, but Catrin (because it's about the relationship between a parent and child) and Mid-Term break (because it's about the death of a child) seem the ones that you could talk most about.

For some help on the poems of Seamus Heaney, and a good Venn diagram showing links between his poems, try http://62.8.97.161/images/587-T2.pdf.

Both Johnson and Heaney really make me understand how terrible it is when the person who has died is a child. Although Johnson tries to come to terms with the death, suggesting that he son was only "lent" to him, and that he is lucky to have "scaped worlds and fleshes rage", meaning that his son has not had to deal with all the awful things that can happen to somebody during a lifetime, he is clearly devastated.

He says that his son was his "best piece of poetrie" and for a famous poet, presumably proud of his poems, this says it all. When he hopes that his son rests in "soft peace", I can see that he loved him. The word "soft" implies gentleness and quiet and I imagine his son asleep under a silk sheet.

Heaney creates a similar image in Mid term Break, when he talks about the snowdrops and candles, which "soothed" the bedside. To soothe somebody is to calm them and care for them, and again, I have this picture of a child asleep under a white sheet. The fact that the only sign that he has been hurt is the "poppy bruise" (another reference to flowers) on his temple, makes it seem even more likely that he is only asleep, not really dead.

However, it is the last line of the poem which really does for me every time.It makes the death so final, standing as a line all by itself at the end of the poem, "A four foot box, a foot for every year". It's such a poignant image - that small coffin - bringing it home to the reader that this was a very, very young child.