Here is a detailed analysis of Derek Walcott’s poem “Forest of Europe”; it’s tailored towards students taking the CIE / Cambridge A-Level syllabus but will be useful for anyone who’s working on understanding the poem at any level.
Great for revision, missed lessons, boosting analytical...
“The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow….”
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Ovals - slightly squashed circular shapes
Gawky - awkward looking and nervous
Manuscripts - handwritten documents
Inlaid copper laurel of oak - the few last leaves of an oak tree, that look as though
they are made out of inlaid copper rather than natural material as they have turned
brown and are about to drop off for the winter
Mandelstam - Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet (see the context for more info)
Ruble - the currency of Russia
Neva - a river in Northwest Russia (see the context for more info)
Gutturals - harsh sounds made from the throat
Oklahoma - a state in the Southern US
Gulag Archipelago- a non-fiction text by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
about life in the Gulag, Soviet forced labor camps that were set up for prison inmates
(see the context for more info)
Runnels - small gutters made by the flow of water, usually rainwater
Herdsman - a shepherd, someone who rears herds of animals
Stubbled - making short and stiff shapes, as in stubbled hair growth that occurs as a
man grows a beard
Writer’s Congress - a meeting of Soviet writers and intellectuals that occurred in
August 1934.
Cossacks - people from the East Slavic region, primarily Russians and Ukrainians
(see the context for more info)
, Choctaw - a Native American people who live in the Southern US region
Treaties - political documents that are drawn up and signed by states or countries in
order to make agreements over certain socio-political matters
Brazen - brave, fearless, reckless
Icons - a picture or representation of a spiritual person, such as a religious leader or
saint.
Floes - floating sheets of ice
Freight yards - a space on a railway line that is designed for loading and unloading
cargo from freight trains
Consonants - non-vowel letters (everything except ‘a, e, i, o, u’)
Forlorn - sad, lonely, abandoned
Prairie - low, flat-lying grassland
Desolate - abandoned and empty, a bleak and barren place
Parapets - protective walls or railings such as those found on the edges of a castle -
used either for military defense or to protect people from falling
To mint a sovereign - ‘to mint’ means to make coins by imprinting them, a sovereign
is an old fashioned type of coin made out of solid gold
Hudson’s silhouettes - the shadows of the Hudson River, a large river that flows
through the Eastern US states, from Vermont to New York.
Tributary - a small river that flows into a larger river or lake
Emigrants - people who leave their native country to live elsewhere
Exile - being cast out from a place and not allowed to return
Classless - not having a specific class (e.g. working, middle or upper class)
Threshing harvesters - farming machines which separate
Quivering - trembling
Sunstroke - a sickness contracted from being in the sun too long
Corruptible - able to be corrupted / manipulated / spoiled
Worth its salt - an expression meaning ‘good at the job’
Condensation - when water vapour turns back into the water on a surface
Borealis - the ‘northern lights’, an aurora of light that emerges over the northern
hemisphere
Ague - illness / shivering fever
Ruble - a Russian form of currency
Mastodons - extinct elephant-like creatures, woolly mammoths are part of the
mastodon group of animals
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