1. Country
School
Allen
Curnow

2. Your first school
• Discuss with a partner what you remember about the first
school you ever went to.
• What was it like? And what did it seem like to you back then?
Have you seen it since? How has it changed? How do you feel
about it now that you think of it?

3. GET FLIRTY!!!
F 1. Focus on the form of the poem , looking at the structure, punctuation,
line lengths and the arrangement of the poem’s stanzas. How do these
features add interest and meaning to the poem? Also examine the
arrangements of the words, phrases and sentences in the poem.
2. Examine the language used in the poem, looking at the meaning of
L words and whether they have negative or positive connotations.
3. Look at the techniques, imagery and poetic language that has been
I used? How do these techniques bring out the main themes and ideas in
the poem?
4. How does the poet make use of rhyme, repetition and rhythm? Why
R does he do this?
5. What are the poet’s main ideas that he brings out in the poem and how
does he do this? Explain the feelings that the poet conveys throughout
T the poem. Describe the poet’s attitude to his subject. Does this change
as the poem progresses? Carefully examine the tone throughout the
poem and find vocabulary to back up your discussion.
Y 6. How do you react to this poem? Does it bring any particular thoughts to
mind? Which poems would you compare this one with?

4. Brief background
www.bookcouncil.org.nz Go to for a full biography.
No New Zealand poet so consistently defied expectations as Allen
Curnow. Over his long and deeply influential career, Curnow traversed
a huge terrain of poetic voices and concerns, and won many awards
and other forms of recognition. He was made a CBE in 1986 and
received the Order of New Zealand in 1990, and was awarded the A.W.
Reed Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2000 Montana New Zealand
Book Awards. In his Collected Poems 1933–73, Curnow wrote: ‘I had to
get past the severities, not to say rigidities, of our New Zealand anti-
myth: away from questions which present themselves as public and
answerable, towards the questions which are always private and
unanswerable.’ A critic and anthologiser of New Zealand
poetry, Curnow’s observations throughout his lifetime shaped the
direction and debates — often controversial — about poetry in this
country

5. Biography
Curnow was born in Timaru, New Zealand, on June 17, 1911. His father, Tremayne Munro
Curnow, a fourth-generation New Zealander, was an Anglican clergyman who published
light verse in the local newspaper; his mother, Jessamine Towler (Gambling) Curnow, was
born in England and could trace her ancestry to the Romantic poet George Crabbe.
Educated at the universities of Canterbury and Auckland, Curnow studied to be an Anglican
priest in 1931-33 before becoming a journalist. Curnow's first collection of poems, Valley of
Decision (1933), reflects his crisis of religious vocation. In 1935, Caxton Press published
Curnow's Three Poems and the short manifesto Poetry and Language. He married Elizabeth
LeCren in 1936, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. During the years of WWII,
Curnow worked for the Caxton Press, wrote a verse play, The Axe (1949), and edited a
seminal anthology, A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-45 (1945), which provided the first
substantial representation and coherent analysis of New Zealand poetry. In 1949, a grant
allowed Curnow to travel to London, where he spent a week with Dylan Thomas and
worked for the News Chronicle and the BBC. In 1951, Curnow, now recognized as one of
New Zealand's leading writers, joined the staff of the English Department at the University
of Auckland, a position he held for twenty-five years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Curnow had
a public dispute with poets Louis Johnson and James K. Baxter, who took issue with his
reviews of their work and with his second anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand
Verse (1960), which they deemed too narrowly nationalistic in its scope. In 1965, Curnow
divorced Elizabeth and married Jenifer Tole. A prolific writer, Curnow published into his
nineties—his last book, The Bells of Saint Babels (2001), was published the year of his
death at age 90. Throughout Curnow's long and distinguished career, he received many
awards, including the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry on six occasions, the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1988, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1989, the
Cholmondley Award in 1992, and the A. W. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. He
was knighted in 1986 and appointed to the Order of New Zealand in 1990.

6. Major Works
A humane optimism and a particularity of place and time run through Curnow's poetic
career. Valley of Decision reflects a concern with spirituality that remains central
throughout his writing. Enemies: Poems 1934-36 (1937), Not in Narrow Seas
(1939), Island and Time (1941), and Sailing or Drowning (1943) reveal a developing
modernist poetry and a consciousness of New Zealand's landscape, history, and situation
as a small island nation in a wider world that was at war. Some poems from this period
include “The Unhistoric Story,” “The Victim,” and “Landfall in Unknown Seas,” which
develop what Curnow terms “the anti-myth” about the discovery of New Zealand by
Europeans. As Curnow's work became less preoccupied with history and national
identity and moved toward personal and universal themes in the 1940s and 1950s, it
also became less stylistically formal and more conversational. As he wrote in Collected
Poems, 1933-73 (1974): “I had to get past the severities, not to say rigidities, of New
Zealand's anti-myth, away from questions which present themselves as public and
answerable, toward questions which are always private and unanswerable.”
Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects (1972) and An Incorrigible Music (1979) feature
colloquial, imagistic, and idiomatic language that juxtapose Lone Kauri Road and
Karekare Beach with Washington, D.C. in the 1960s and Italy in the fifteenth century.
Family history figures prominently in the title poem of An Abominable Temper, and
Other Poems (1973), in which the poet creates a portrait of his great-great-grandfather.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Curnow began drawing upon childhood incidents, especially in
The Loop in Lone Kauri Road: Poems, 1983-85 (1986), Continuum: New and Later
Poems, 1972-1988 (1988), and Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997
(1997). Between poems with Karekare settings and the poems with childhood
Canterbury settings an elaborate pattern of contrasts and oppositions is implicitly
established: youth and age, south and north, Canterbury and Auckland, east and
west, Pacific and Tasman, plains and bush. In Selected Poems, 1940-1989 (1990), Curnow
replaced the chronological arrangement of earlier collections with broadly thematic
sequences in order to make a single poem that spanned his poetic lifetime.

7. Critical Reception
In his long and distinguished career, Curnow received many awards and is regarded
as one of New Zealand's finest poets. Chris Wallace-Crabbe praises Curnow's later
poetry for its “excited intelligence” and “its joy in rootedness,” while Trevor James,
lauding the “sense of unity and interrelatedness” of the seemingly disparate poems
in An Incorrigible Music, finds that the “submerged urgency” of those poems
“makes them a moving testament to a mind which is chillingly honest and
courageous.” As early as 1963, C. K. Stead wrote of A Small Room with Large
Windows (1962): “Mr. Curnow's poetry has already achieved the fullness and
coherence of a major work. Each new poem has been, not merely an addition to,
but an extension and enrichment of what preceded it: the early poems are
enlarged by their successors; the later gain in significance as their connexions with
the earlier are established.” Although some critics have found Curnow to be cold
and abstract—an “intensely cerebral poet”—he has been most criticized for his
vision of a national literature as represented in his anthologies of New Zealand
poetry. In the 1960s, the Wellington group of poets, lead by Louis Johnson and
James K. Baxter, criticized Curnow's anthologies as too prescriptively nationalistic;
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, poets affiliated with the journal Freed, who were
influenced by the Beats and Black Mountain poets, lambasted Curnow's poetry as
hegemonic and conservative, and more recently feminist and Maori critics have
suggested that Curnow's modernist, primarily European, male vision of a national
literature is exclusionary and out-of-date. Despite the datedness of the
anthologies, as C. K. Stead noted in 1989, Curnow “has been a major voice at every
stage of his career, knowing what he is about, moving at his own pace, inventive,
unpredictable, writing poetry which strikes me, as it has done serially over the
years, as unsurpassed by the work of any other poet at present writing in English.”

8. The SIFT method to analyse
and revise poems.
Specify the subject matter and sense of the poem through a brief
summary
Inform us of the intention of the poet and his/her main ideas overall
Focus on the form ( structure/punctuation) and the feelings conveyed (
poet’s attitude/tone used) and how this highlights the main ideas
Tell us about the techniques, imagery and poetic language that show the
ways ideas are presented

9. Close Reading Questions
• Comment on the language techniques and how they further
the ideas. Use the TEAR chart and identify 10 techniques.
• Explain how the rhyme scheme furthers the poets ideas.
• Why does the poet refer heavily to the “Pinus” and why use
the botanical term rather than the common “pine”?
• Comment on “O sweet antiquity!” and what it means in the
poem.
• Explain the poet’s changing perspectives on the school.
• What’s the effect of the use of listing in lines 3 and 11.
• What if the last stanza was omitted, how would the meaning
and tone of the poem change?
• What if the poet’s tone had only been positive about the
school?

10. TEAR chart
Technique Example Analysis Relevance (so,
what?)

11. Analyse this…
In the list of statements about the
poem, you are to provide evidence
(or more evidence) and a
comprehensive explanation of the
point being made.
Do this for:
10 statements = Good
13 statements = Very good
17 statements = Excellent

12. Analysis of Country School
1. In this poem 'Country School', the persona (who might be Allen Curnow
himself) pays a visit to his old school and takes a nostalgic walk down
memory lane recalling his childhood. As this poem reminisces, the
persona seems to realize that things are not as bad as they seemed
before.
2. A consideration of aging is evident.
3. The tone of the persona sways between enthusiastic and apathetic.
4. In this poem, the persona describes a country school that seems to be in
a dilapidated condition.
5. The vivid image drawn by the alliterative phrase 'Paint all peeled'
supports the fact that the school is deteriorating.
6. With the alliterative phrase 'tufts topping', one is able to picture a
country school with Pinus tufts on the 'roof ridge', an image of a typical
country school.
7. The colloquial word 'dunny' evokes a distinctly rural New Zealand image
conjuring up the past.
8. 'Girls squeal skipping' presents a familiar auditory and visual picture of
primary school.

13. Analysis of Country School
1. Several sound effects help describe what the persona is thinking.
2. The tripping and abrupt 'r' sounds in “rank, … roof-ridge” punctuated with the
alliteration of ‘t’ in the second stanza have an awkward effect like someone
learning to speak.
3. “Nor’west” is colloquial and leads into the simile about a ‘gale’ like waves
breaking over a ‘reef’. How does this contrast with the use of ‘Pinus’?
4. The 2nd stanza is crammed full of imagery which flow together in an
integrated way, linking them and helping form a broad and busy reflection of
the country school.
5. The 'b' sounds in 'bargeboard, weatherboard and gibbet belfry' calls attention
to the detailed observation of building materials and structures creating a
vivid image.
6. Allen Curnow has employed parallelism as well as repetition in order to draw
links in this poem. The parallel comparison of 'How small; how sad', reinforces
how the persona is recalling his days back in school.
7. The passing of time and the diminishing of his memory suggests he is aging
for the very doors that seemed huge as a kid are rather 'small'.
8. The persona refers to himself as a third person and this is deduced through
the repetition of the word 'you'. The persona is having difficulty reconnecting
with his old school or his old self that he feels more comfortable referring to
himself in third person.
9. Use of the pronoun ‘you’ does help to include readers in his recollection and
prompt their own memories of school.