N.B: I am the person who asked the question about Tissue in the first place. See here for more responses about the issue.
People are worried it's unfair to produce content that may be helpful to revise from for people like me who will be sitting an exam that may involve that poem. Indeed, there is one question where Tissue is one of 15 poems we may be asked about.
This is a compare question, and you're not supposed to think on your feet (see mark scheme below). That's for the unseen poetry test . Anyone will have access to your observations, and I wasn't asking you to produce a polished comparison essay, but a few bullet points about POWER in Tissue. Here are a few subjects (of the 15-poem question) that the teachers have pointed out as likely:
Power of Humans, Power of Nature, Effects of Conflict, Reality of Conflict, Loss and Absence, Memory, Negative Emotion [anger/guilt/fear/pride], Identity, Individual Experiences.
Compare how the writer presents X (e.g. Identity) in X (e.g. My Last Duchess), and one other poem from your Power and Conflict anthology.
The 14 other poems are well-known, interesting, and discussable in class - e.g, Ozymandias - but Tissue is five times more demanding, and has lots of strange concepts which are harder to break down. This is from the 2018 GCSE syllabus, with mock exams in May/June of this year and next year. The 15-poems question is 45 minutes. You are given one of the poems you've studied, but you have to compare it to another one that you remember.
Anything that doesn't answer the question gets no marks. E.g, I once said
"In Exposure, Owen uses the first-person plural pronoun 'we' to present the soldier's opinion as universal, whereas the writer of Bayonet Charge uses the third-person singular pronoun 'he' to make it sound like one man's story."
This was irrelevant to "how the writer presents the power of nature", so that point was worth 0. No-one will get away with parroting random points about the poem, such as POWER, which is the only think I'm asking for help with. The exam is designed to more sophisticated now. You cannot get more than a level 3 (grade D) for doing that even if the question is about power.
Here are some links to the real specification: Here for poetry / here for exemplar responses / here for examiners' assessment objectives :
Or, read my paraphrased specification. I've bolded the text that bolsters my argument:
Read fluently, and with good understanding, a wide range of literary
texts
Evaluate poetry critically and make clear, focused, sustained and consistent comparisons between texts
- Summarise and synthesise ideas from poetry, showing a clear understanding of both texts
- Use knowledge gained from wide reading to inform and improve their own writing
Write effectively and coherently using Standard English appropriately
Acquire and apply a wide vocabulary, alongside a knowledge and
understanding of grammatical terminology, and linguistic conventions
for reading, writing and spoken language
- Use a range of references from both poems effectively to illustrate and justify an explanation
- Demonstrate an understanding of perspectives and contextual factors in both poems.