Paper 2 — literature

Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems

Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems is the poetry for English Home Language, Grade 12. Read the copy your school prescribed. This lesson does not replace that book.

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Grade 12 · English Home Language · Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems

Literature answers from the text, in the shape the question asked for.

This page
Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems. Know the conflict, who wants what, and one theme you can prove from two moments. Grades 10 and 11 use the texts your school chose. Grade 12 uses the prescribed work your school entered. Read that copy. This lesson does not replace it.
Contextual question
Stay on the extract or the stanza you were given. If it says quote, the words must come from that extract. Then say what those words show. Point, evidence, explanation. Stop when you have as many points as there are marks.
Essay
The introduction names the text and answers the question. The body proves it with the book, not with the writer’s childhood. The last paragraph answers again and does not start a new scene. On Home Language you do not write two essays if the paper says the other genre must be contextual.
Poetry, seen and unseen
Name the theme in one sentence. Then one feature that is really there: an image, a refrain, a turn, a contrast. Say how that feature makes the theme felt. An unseen poem has no notes. Do not write a technique you cannot point to.

Paper 2 is 80 marks. Tone is not theme. A quotation with no comment earns only the quote. A life of the poet earns nothing unless the question asked for it.

Worked example

English Home Language, Grade 12. Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems. Answer it as literature: point, evidence, effect.

Simplified approach

Read the question’s verb. Stay inside Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems. One piece of evidence for each point.

Culture note

In a South African English Home Language class, Grade 12 literature is ordinary Paper 2 work. The prescribed copy stays the source.

Step 1 / 8

Overview

Imagined Worlds — 12 prescribed poems is the poetry for English Home Language, Grade 12. Read the copy your school prescribed. This lesson does not replace that book.

Prescribed works

These are the Grade 12 works the Mind the Gap guides prepare. Your school chooses which novel, drama, or anthology you sit. Read that book. Copyrighted novels, plays, and poems are not pasted into Easified. Public-domain poems are printed in full below when this page is their anthology.

Remember by Christina Rossetti
First Day after the War by Mazisi Kunene
The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell
Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang by Jeremy Cronin
Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden
A Hard Frost by Cecil Day Lewis
An African Thunderstorm by David Rubadiri
An African Elegy by Ben Okri
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by E.E. Cummings
The Garden of Love by William Blake
Felix Randal by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Vultures by Chinua Achebe

Remember — Christina Rossetti (public domain)

Public domain. Kunene, Cronin, Auden, Okri, Cummings, Achebe, and the other modern poems stay in your anthology.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

More worked examples

Board walkthroughs on this topic. Open one, copy the working, then try the next.

Example 1 / 20

Imagined Worlds. Remember by Christina Rossetti. In two points, state what the poem is about and name one feature of form or one image. Then join them.

4. Step-by-step working

01
Identify the given
A Petrarchan sonnet. The octave asks to be remembered. The sestet turns: it is better that the loved one forgets and smiles.
theme
02
Apply the law
Name the form, the refrain, the turn, or one image, and say what it does to the reader.
feature

How we got there

Read this like a teacher at the board. We go slowly, name every number, and say why we take each step.

Explain in another language · 11

1. What is the question asking?

Read the question twice. Circle the unknown. Underline every number and unit. The paper is asking: Imagined Worlds. Remember by Christina Rossetti. In two points, state what the poem is about and name one feature of form or one image. Then join them.

In other words — as if you have never seen this before

If you have never seen this before: Theme in one sentence. Feature or image in the next. The third sentence says how that feature makes the theme felt. We will name a method in words, write the formula with no numbers, then substitute one line at a time.

2. What do we already know?

Poetry contextual question. The poem is in your anthology. Do not write the poet’s biography.

3. Which method — and why this one?

Theme in one sentence. Feature or image in the next. The third sentence says how that feature makes the theme felt.

4. Step-by-step working

01 / 05
Identify the given
A Petrarchan sonnet. The octave asks to be remembered. The sestet turns: it is better that the loved one forgets and smiles.
theme
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
02 / 05
Apply the law
Name the form, the refrain, the turn, or one image, and say what it does to the reader.
feature
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
03 / 05
Sense-check
The feature must serve the theme. A rhyme scheme that you do not link to the meaning is decoration.
joined
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
04 / 05
Step F — Box the answer with its unit
A Petrarchan sonnet. The octave asks to be remembered. The sestet turns: it is better that the loved one forgets and smiles.
Why this step: A number without a unit is half a mark on a Physics paper, and a marker can miss a Maths answer that is buried in working.
05 / 05
Step H — What the marker is looking for
On an NSC memo you usually earn: (1) a method mark for naming the right formula or idea in words, (2) an accuracy mark for substituting the given numbers with units, (3) an accuracy mark for the boxed answer with its unit. Write those three lines even if you are unsure of the arithmetic — blank pages score zero.
Why this step: First-timers chase the final number and leave the method blank. The memo still pays out for the idea and the substitution even when the last line is wrong.

5. The answer

A Petrarchan sonnet. The octave asks to be remembered. The sestet turns: it is better that the loved one forgets and smiles.

6. Check it like a marker

Do not miss the turn. The poem does not end on the command to remember.

7. A trap first-timers fall into

First-timers often grab the first formula they remember, mix units (cm with m, minutes with seconds), or drop a minus sign. Write the formula in words first: “this equals that, because…”

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Paper 3: essay and transactional texts

English Home Language

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