The Perseverance

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Standard 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Language, identity and culture). It is not on the 2019 to 2026 list that the 2026 HSC uses. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits the focus area

Raymond Antrobus is a British poet who is deaf and whose heritage is English and Jamaican. The Perseverance is a collection of poems about those parts of his life: how language is learned and misread, how a family is remembered, and how a person is named and judged by others. Because the poems are about the way language, including spoken, written and signed language, forms identity, they fit the focus area closely.

How to use this page

NESA sets the Tin House Books edition (2021, ISBN 9781951142421) and seven poems: Echo; Jamaican British; Ode to My Hair; Dear Hearing World; The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame; Dr Marigold Reevaluated; and To Sweeten Bitter. This page describes the poet's characteristic methods so you can apply them to those poems. Anchor every claim to a set poem you can point to in your copy.

Titles are a useful first clue to form. Ode to My Hair borrows the ode, Dear Hearing World takes the shape of an address to an audience, and The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame is a persona poem that speaks across history. Jamaican British names a dual inheritance in two words. Check each poem in the Tin House edition before making claims about what it does.

Three of the set poems

Echo. The title names a sound that returns late and altered, which suits a poet who writes about hearing. Look for the place where a child's own name or a family voice is played with, and ask what repetition does to the gap between a child and the people around him.

Dr Marigold Reevaluated. The title may call to mind Doctor Marigold, a Victorian story by Charles Dickens, and the word Reevaluated suggests a second look at something. Check in your copy whether the poem draws on that story. If it does, ask what it keeps, what it challenges, and how a modern deaf poet's authority changes the reading.

To Sweeten Bitter. The title is a phrase about softening something harsh. Ask in your own reading what is bitter in the poem, what does the sweetening, and whether the title is a hope, a cost or an irony. Anchor your points to line breaks, sound and image in the printed poem.

Characteristic method 1: the speaking voice

Antrobus often writes in a direct, conversational first person voice. Ask of each poem who is speaking, to whom and in what situation. Notice moments where the voice addresses someone directly, and what that address does: it can accuse, comfort, explain or remember.

Characteristic method 2: sound, silence and form

Poems about deafness invite attention to how the page itself represents sound. Look at line breaks, white space, repetition and the arrangement of lines. Where a poem uses unusual layout or a stripped back structure, ask what that form says about hearing, listening or being unheard. Make the link between form and meaning explicit in your writing.

Characteristic method 3: family, memory and grief

Many poems turn to family, especially a father, and to memory. Track the images the poet returns to and the tone: tender, angry, wry, restrained. A strong response explains how an image carries feeling without being stated outright.

Characteristic method 4: being misread

Several poems deal with how others interpret a deaf person, in school and in public. Show how the poems turn an everyday incident into a larger point about power, assumption and who gets to define another person.

Context as a driver of argument

Use the poet's background to explain why certain concerns recur: the experience of deafness in a hearing world, a dual cultural inheritance, and the complexity of belonging in more than one place. Keep context in service of the argument about the poem, and do not treat the poems as simple autobiography.

Common pitfalls

• Writing about a poem that is not one of the seven set poems.
• Naming techniques with no effect (alliteration, enjambment, repetition).
• Treating deafness only as a disability rather than as a language, culture and perspective that the poems explore.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. Thesis about how the poems show language shaping identity, naming two or three set poems and the methods you will discuss.

Body 1. Voice and address in Dear Hearing World: who is addressed, and what the direct address demands of a hearing reader.

Body 2. Sound, silence and form in Echo: how repetition and the shape of the lines represent what is heard and unheard.

Body 3. Persona and being misread in The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame, with Dr Marigold Reevaluated as a counterpoint: how the speaker's position, as you read it in your copy, bears on who gets to define another person.

Conclusion. Argue that Antrobus answers being misread by speaking back: Dear Hearing World addresses the listener directly, Jamaican British puts a double inheritance in its title, and Ode to My Hair turns praise on something personal and bodily. Together they treat naming oneself as the way a speaker claims a place, and you should say which of the three gives that claim its strongest form.

Read the text

The Perseverance is in copyright. Borrow it from your school or local library, or buy a current edition from a bookseller. Use the Tin House Books edition NESA sets.

Sources

• NESA, HSC English prescriptions (checked 7 October 2026, year 2026).
• NESA, English Standard Year 12 content pages: page 1, page 2 (prescription lists, checked 7 October 2026).