SYLVIA PLATH’S poem Black Rook in Rainy Weather is one of the standout poems for those taking higher-level English in the Leaving Cert exam. Yesterday was a black day in rainy weather for these students, as Plath failed to surface in the paper two poetry section.
To compound the agony, the other “hot tip”, Séamus Heaney, was also conspicuous by his absence.
On Twitter last night, the “most difficult English exam in a generation” was trending. As if taking their cue from Plath, the talk was only of darkness and depression. There was, it seems, a troublesome “wringing of hands” as 35,000 students rushed to the last page of the paper to find what Plath called a “dark ceiling without a star”.
No Plath. No Heaney. No way out.
No one knows exactly how Plath and Heaney gained their status as The Poets Who Will Come Up This Year. In any given year, predicting who is coming up in the Leaving is, at best, an inexact science.
In the game of Leaving Cert Russian roulette, students are advised to be familiar with five of eight poets on the course.
By a process of elimination (Who came up last year? Is there a female poet? Or an Irish one?), students hone in on one or two favourites.
On the eve of the exam one student had her own forecasting method, tweeting; “Rain = Depression. Depression = Main theme of Plath. Conclusion = Plath will come up.”
All of the many tips on Facebook, Twitter and (whisper it) from some grind schools had established Plath and Heaney as certainties for Leaving Cert 2012.
Perhaps everyone should have known better.
Earlier this year, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn railed against the “predictability” of the Leaving Cert exam.
He even asked the State Exams Commission, which sets the papers, to compile a report for him on the issue. This is expected later this year.
English teachers were calling yesterday’s exam a “game changer”. One said: “The days of the pre-cooked, single transferable response to questions on the English paper are over. This was a much more searching exam.”
Back on Twitter, some disconsolate students – who had not been let in on these new realities – were picking up the pieces. One tweeted about “that awkward moment when you look at the exam, see that your poets aren’t there, then burst into tears”.
Another complained how her English teacher “spent a collective four weeks on Sylvia Plath and just two classes on every poet that DID come up”.
