THAT'S HOW WE RUN OUT OF OXYGEN [Copyrighted] Ogaga Ifowodo Winner 🥇 The 2026 Nigeria 🇳🇬 Prize 🏆 for Literature 〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️ And that's how we are paralysed, sitting there heaving spoonfuls of curried rice and minced meat in our mouths, the wine breathing beside precious china, a delightful red, while the fearless furnish their fury with v*rgin girls (boys sometimes, they can quickly learn to shoot): that is how we surrender our lungs to zealots whose lust is stronger than our outrage, deeper than the seabed, where no prayer reaches: how lying down to dream, we drown with our convictions as the mad megaphones of God muddle speech, pitch their tents in every street: how we strain in vain to recall the shared air, land, water, the colour of what flows in our veins, but very soon run out of oxygen, and unmake the molecules of our blood, said the preacher, reciting verses not out of the good book but the book he writes in the hour Christ wept. How to analyse a poem for GCSEs O’Level [Copyrighted Material Used for Teaching Purposes Only] ----------------------------------------------------------- THE FIVE Ws The five Ws can help us begin to understand the poem. Consider: what is the poem about? When is it set? Where is it set? Why did the poet write it? Who is speaking (‘the perspective’)/ who are they speaking to? THE TWO Ts- THEME / TONE You can also think about the two Ts: theme and tone. What do you think are the poem’s key themes (the central ideas)? How would you characterise the tone? As you read the poem, think about which of the five Ws and two Ts you can spot in it. You might not be able to answer all of them for every poem you come across. Make some notes about the ones you can spot. Notes – REMEMBER: WHAT / WHEN / WHERE / WHY / WHO? Did you identify any of these features please? ------------------------------------------------- 1. metaphor 2. first-person singular point of view 3. sibilance (a hissing sound is created in a group of words through the repetition of 's' sounds.) 4. repetition 4b. consonance (the recurrence of similar-sounding consonants in close proximity) 5. abstract nouns 6. juxtaposition 7. declarative 8. alliteration 9. enjambment (Enjambment, from the French meaning “a striding over,” is a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break.) 10. assonance 11. tripling (Groups of three – repetition of three phrases) 12. structural parallelism (example -“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance.) 13. imperative 14. couplets 15. interrogative 16. personification 17. semantic fields (The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property. Most often, fields are defined by subject matter, such as body parts, landforms, diseases, colours, foods, or kinship relations.) 18. first-person plural point of view 19. imagery 20. simile. See less #MagentaMonday #AllMetalMonday

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