A simple PPT for Patricia Beer's 'The Lost Woman' to assist in analysis of the poem for IGCSE Literature.

1. Patricia Beer

2. Patricia Beer
• Born in Exmouth, Devon
• Hey family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren
(conservative religious community)
• Her dominant mother was proud of her clever,
literary daughter and intended her to be a
teacher.
• Moved away from her religious background as a
young adult, focusing more on being an
academic.
• Attended Exeter & Oxford Universities
• Lectured English in Italy, before returning to
lecture English at Goldsmith’s College in London.
1924 - 1999

3. What’s the poem about?
• The speaker’s mother dies, and returns to
haunt her as a voice
• The poem is autobiographical in nature –
Patricia Beer lost her mother at the age of 14
• Death and the haunting of the living by the
dead were subjects Beer returned to
repeatedly in her seven collections of poetry,
and these themes can be seen clearly in ‘The
Lost Woman’.

4. My mother went with no more warning
Than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.

5. She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-woman turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.

6. I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a cliché-ridden village
She met her match at an extra-mural
Class and the OU summer school.

7. Many a hero in his time
And every poet has acquired
A lost woman to haunt the home,
To be compensated and desired,
Who will not alter, who will not grow,
A corpse they need never get to know.

8. She is nearly always benign. Her habit
Is not to stride at dead of night.
Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-
Light she comes out. Hear how they hate
Themselves for losing her as they did.
Her country is bland and she does not chide.

9. But my lost woman evermore snaps
From somewhere else: ‘You did not love me.
I sacrificed too much perhaps.
I showed you the way to rise above me
And you took it. You are the ghost
With the bat-voice, my dear, I am not lost.’

10. Form & Structure
• 6 stanzas of 6 lines each
• Elegy - a poem of serious reflection, typically a
lament for the dead.
• Each different stanza has a different implied
meaning, (e.g. the first stanza represents her
mother leaving.)
• Basic rhyme structure is ABABCC but the effect is
softened through half-rhyme and enjambment.
• Loose rhyming pattern ('pain/lane, white/gate
and years/wars‘)

11. Tone, Mood & Figurative Language
• Tone – confusion & grief, tension, feeling of
abandonment “my mother went”, guilt and
frustration at the end.
• Mood – Sad, a sense of being lost without a
mother figure, as if she left too soon
• Descriptive adjectives & adverbs (shocking,
bright, haunt)
• Personification & metaphor
• Juxtaposition : “bright voice and a bad pain”

12. Check out more resources here…
• https://prezi.com/ywexaqoxoiuh/the-lost-
woman/
• https://prezi.com/rfun-_t1z9b3/the-lost-
woman/
• https://www.powtoon.com/show/grkvQljY5gF
/patricia-beer-the-lost-woman/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDpjKtRi
X6k

13. Essay Questions:
1. Patricia Beer lost her mother when she was
fourteen years old. How does the poetess take
her readers into a fairy-tale land?
2. How does Patricia Beer juxtapose the contrast
between emotional detachment & fictitious fancy
in her poem ‘ The Lost Woman’?
3. How does Patricia Beer’s attitude towards death
make her poem ‘The Lost Woman’ intense?