Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Dear AQA

I've just been discussing online, with a student, the incredibly stupid and irrelevant question you set him or her on an "unseen poem", namely my "The Beautiful Lie", see below. You ask "What do you think the poet is saying about parenthood?"

Please read said poem and tell me where in it there is any mention of parenthood, or indeed any parents. It's about a young child discovering, for the first time, how to interpret the world differently, i.e. tell a lie, and how he realises this is the doorway to artistic creativity, the key to telling stories, painting pictures, making up characters. Due to this daft question you have set, the student has supposed that the lie at the centre of the poem must in fact be a Bad Thing and that the poem's "message" (I'm sure you think poems must have a message) is that parents should discourage lying. Admittedly the student has, in order to arrive at this interpretation, had to ignore all the positive vocabulary that builds up around the "lie" from the title on. But that's easily done; he or she has simply assumed that the celebration of the "beautiful lie" and all it leads to must be "ironic".

In the poem there's a grandmother, a grandson and an unnamed narrator who chooses not to reveal his or her relationship to the boy. This narrator spends the whole time undermining what he/she has already said: giving us "facts" and then admitting they may have been misremembered or simply invented. We shall never know, because that's what writers do. Much as I generally agree that the interpretation of a poem is a matter for reader as well as writer, you do need to back up said interpretation from the text, and if you can find me so much as a single phrase in the text that suggests the poem says anything at all about parenthood, I'll be mightily surprised. It's things like this that make me think it would be better if poetry were not taught (and certainly not tested) in schools at all, rather than by those who have no understanding of it.

The Beautiful Lie

He was about four, I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas
- snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:
"Did you do that?"

Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see, in his face,
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.

When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed

but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.

I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.
Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.