Literary commentary in English: the first Year 3 test

It is the end of September, Year 3 at the liceo linguistico (the Italian language-focused high school), and English as the first foreign language (Inglese Lingua 1) has just dropped from four hours to three: in exactly the year when the programme changes nature, an hour is taken away. The literature calendar starts from the origins and the Middle Ages — Beowulf, the popular ballads — passes through Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, and reaches the Renaissance with the sonnet and Shakespeare before the end of the year. The first literature test, almost always on ballads and/or Beowulf, falls between mid-November and early December: from today that is seven to ten weeks.

The problem: it is not the same subject as last year

Up to the first two years, an “English test” meant grammar, reading comprehension, perhaps an essay on a general topic. From this year the text type changes: the test is a commentary on a literary text in the language, plus an essay. And this is where the student who “speaks brilliantly” gets a 5 — someone who has spent a year abroad, who watches series in the original language without subtitles, who is the most fluent in the class in conversation. It is not a paradox: speaking well and commenting on a literary text are two different skills, and the second is taught, not absorbed.

The reason this step hits so hard is that literary commentary has a form of its own, which in Italian the student may already master (they have seen it in Year 3 text analysis) but has never transferred into English, with the right critical vocabulary and the conventions of the language. And they do it with one less lesson hour a week than in the first two years, just when the load increases.

Why a summary gets a 5

Literary commentary in English asks for four things that a summary doesn’t give:

1. What the text says (content) — but not in the order in which the text says it, rather organised by themes.
2. How it says it (form) — the formal choices: who is speaking, how the text is built, which rhetorical devices it uses.
3. Why those choices matter (interpretation) — linking form and content, not listing them separately.
4. A reasoned personal position (personal response) — not “I like it” or “I don’t like it”, but an argued observation with a reference to the text.

A summary (plot summary) does only the first point, and does it in the order of the text instead of by themes. It is an error of text type even before it is an error of content: the teacher is not assessing “did you understand the story”, but “can you analyse a literary text”, and a plot summary — even a correct one, even in fluent English — doesn’t answer that question. That is why the student who is most fluent in conversation can get a 5 on a text they understood perfectly: they answered the wrong question.

The structure of the commentary, step by step

A solid commentary always follows the same scheme, in this order:

1. Context, in one or two sentences. Who the author is (if known), which genre/period the text belongs to, what it is about in general. No more: the context is an opening, not a disguised summary.
2. Content. What happens or is said in the text, organised by themes or logical moments — not line by line.
3. Form. The author’s formal choices:
   • speaker/narrator — who is speaking, in first or third person, with what voice;
   • structure — how the text is organised (stanzas, sections, development of the argument);
   • stanza and rhyme scheme — if it is poetry, how many stanzas, which rhyme scheme;
   • refrain — a line or phrase that returns identical or nearly so;
   • repetition — words or structures repeated with an expressive function;
   • alliteration — repetition of the same consonant sound at the start of nearby words;
   • imagery — the sensory images the text builds;
   • kenning — in Anglo-Saxon poetry (Beowulf), a compound expression that replaces a common noun with a fixed metaphor (e.g. whale-road for “sea”).
4. Themes / interpretation. The link between form and content: why the author chose exactly that structure, that rhythm, that repetition, and what it communicates.
5. Personal response, supported with at least one precise reference to the text — not a generic judgement.

The most common weak point is not any of the five steps taken singly: it is keeping them separate. The jump in level comes when the student stops listing “there’s repetition, there’s alliteration” and starts writing “the repetition of X reinforces Y”.

Essential critical vocabulary

Bridge phrases that hold up a paragraph of analysis, to reuse as a structure:

• “The poem opens with…” — to introduce the content.
• “This repetition suggests…” — to link form and interpretation.
• “The use of [device] conveys a sense of…” — the most useful scheme of all: name of the rhetorical device + linking verb + effect.
• “Unlike the previous stanza, here…” — to signal a development or a turn.
• “This could be read as…” — for the personal response, without sounding like an opinion thrown in.

The mistake to avoid, and why it is costly right now

The critical point is simple to state and hard to correct under pressure: you write a commentary, not a summary. It is the first year of literature in the language, and it is exactly where the student who “speaks brilliantly” gets a 5 — because oral fluency doesn’t teach you to organise an analysis by themes instead of by narrative sequence. And the cut from 4 to 3 hours in Year 3 means less time in class to train this new form, so the consolidation work has to be done outside the classroom too.

A second mistake, less often cited but as frequent as the first: answering the comprehension/analysis questions in the textbook with isolated sentences, without linking them into a coherent discourse. The book asks “What is the effect of the alliteration in line 3?” and the student answers with a correct sentence but one disconnected from the rest — missing the chance to build the paragraph that the commentary requires.

Three worked examples

1. “Lord Randal” — one line, two answers

The traditional ballad “Lord Randal” (public-domain text, eighteenth century or earlier) opens like this:

“O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son? / And where hae ye been, my handsome young man?”

A “5” answer (summary): “Lord Randal’s mother asks him where he has been. He says he was in the greenwood and is tired. She keeps asking him questions about his day and what he ate.”

This answer is correct on the facts and completely useless as a commentary: it tells the plot in order, without ever naming a formal choice.

An “8” answer (analysis): “The ballad opens with a question repeated almost identically in each stanza (‘Where hae ye been…’), a structural device typical of oral ballads, which relied on repetition and refrain to be remembered and performed without a written text. The repetition also builds dramatic irony: the mother’s question sounds innocent, but as the ballad progresses the reader suspects — before she does — that something is wrong. This use of refrain conveys both the oral origin of the form and a growing sense of unease.”

The difference is not the amount of correct English — both answers have that — but the fact that the second names a device (repetition, refrain), links it to a function (oral memorisation) and to an effect on the reader (dramatic irony, unease). It is the “device + link + effect” scheme applied in full.

2. “Get Up and Bar the Door” — imagery and comic effect

In the Scottish ballad “Get Up and Bar the Door” (also in the public domain), a couple argue about who should get up to close the front door, and out of pride neither does — not even when two strangers come into the house and start eating their food.

A “5” answer: “A man and a woman argue about closing the door. Two strangers come in and eat their food. In the end the husband speaks first and loses the bet.”

An “8” answer: “The ballad builds its comic effect through escalation: the domestic detail of an unbarred door grows, stanza by stanza, into a scene where strangers eat the couple’s food undisturbed — and the silence is broken only by the husband’s outrage, which costs him the bet. The imagery stays deliberately mundane (food, a door, a household task) throughout, which contrasts with the absurdity of the situation and reinforces the comic tone rather than undermining it.”

Here the key device is not an isolated rhetorical figure but the structure itself (escalation) plus the concrete imagery and the contrast between the domestic register and the absurd situation — again, name + link + effect.

3. Beowulf — a kenning

A typical line from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in the manner of Beowulf, uses hronrade — rendered in modern English as “whale-road” — to indicate the sea.

A “5” answer: “The poem uses difficult words. ‘Whale-road’ means the sea.”

An “8” answer: “‘Whale-road’ is a kenning, a compound metaphor typical of Old English poetry that replaces a common noun (sea) with a two-part figurative expression. Rather than naming the sea directly, the kenning evokes it through the whale’s movement across it, giving the image a sense of vastness and danger appropriate to a warrior culture that saw the sea as a route to both glory and death. Recognising the kenning as a convention of the genre — not an isolated stylistic choice — is what allows a reader to connect it to the poem’s wider concern with heroism and mortality.”

The “8” answer takes one step more than the first two: it places the device inside a genre convention (Anglo-Saxon poetry), it doesn’t treat it as an isolated invention of the author — an observation that is worth full marks when the programme covers Beowulf.

Where it leads, two years from now

This type of commentary — content, form, interpretation, personal response — is exactly the layout of the second English paper in the maturità (the school-leaving exam) at the language high school. It is not an exercise to do now in view of that paper: it is the end point, to see in advance what they will ask you in two years. If you want a concrete idea of the level required, there is the maturità English mock exam — the correct answer is free, the guided solution unlocks with your first lesson.

On the same problem but in Italian — paraphrase and analysis of the poetic text, again in Year 3 — you will find the method in the post on paraphrase and analysis of the poetic text: the underlying logic (content separated from form, a link between the two) is the same, only the language and the critical vocabulary change.

If instead the problem is language certification more than the school grade, that is another story — B2 First and B2 First or DELF B2 deal with the subject, but I don’t touch it here: they are different paths with different deadlines.

For English in general, from grammar to literature, the subject page is English language. And if the first weeks of literary commentary are going wrong, or the lost hour is already being felt, start with a free introductory call.

Frequently asked questions

Does the context need a date or a title if the text is anonymous? If the author or date are not known (as with many popular ballads), it is enough to place the text in its genre and function — e.g. “an anonymous folk ballad, part of an oral tradition” — without inventing information the text doesn’t provide.

How long should the personal response be? A few sentences are enough, as long as they are anchored to a specific element of the text (a line, an image, a formal choice) and don’t remain a generic judgement like “I liked it because it was interesting”.

Is it worth learning the bridge phrases by heart? Yes, as a reusable structure — not as fixed phrases to paste in identically each time. The device and the effect change, the “device + link + effect” structure stays the same in every commentary you will write from here to the maturità.