Cambridge University ELAT - the specific paper answered can be accessed here: https://www.admissionstesting.org/images/183654-elat-past-paper-2014.pdf

Time allowed: 1 hour 30 minutes.You should spend at least 30 minutes reading and annotating the passages and in preparing your answer. The following poems and extracts from longer prose and prose texts are all linked by the theme of journeys and journeying. Select two or three of the passages (a) to (f) and compare and contrast them in any ways that seem interesting to you, paying particular attention to distinctive features of structure, language and style. In your introduction, indicate briefly what you intend to explore or illustrate through close reading of your chosen passages. This task is designed to assess your responsiveness to unfamiliar literary material and your skills in close reading. Marks are not awarded for references to other texts or authors you have studied. 


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In both the extract from Charles Dickens’s ‘Dombey and Son’ and Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Amor Mundi’, journeying is used to examine human choice and power. Whilst Dickens suggests that human choice is limited, Rossetti’ presents speakers whose power to choose is greater. 

Both Dickens and Rossetti use pathetic fallacy to illustrate this; however, they differ in that Dickens uses negation where Rossetti uses positive language. In Dickens the character journeying takes ‘no pleasure […] in the journey’: his mind negates him the pleasures of a ‘rich and varied country’ because he ‘carrie[s] with him’ ‘thoughts of monotony’ that limit his capacity to see the landscape as anything other than a ‘wilderness of blighted plans and knawing jealousies’. Thus, Dickens uses pathetic fallacy to describe the landscape of his protagonist’s journey to suggest a limiting of human choice: the protagonist is passive, ‘tortured by these thoughts’, and thereby forced into a ‘monotony’ that steals the ‘pleasure […and] relief [….of] the journey’ away from him, and enjoyment of the world. Rossetti, on the other hand, presents a situation where her speakers have greater choice - figuring this in the imagery of landscape, which acts as a metaphor for moral decision making.

Where Dickens’s protagonist cannot enjoy the ‘rushing landscape’ he journeys through, Rossetti’s speakers luxuriate in it. This is illustrated through sensory imagery: ‘honey-breathing’, ‘soft twin pigeons’, ‘velvet flowers’ - elevated by euphonic assonance, ‘breathing heather’. There are also sexual connotations to this gustatory, tactile and olfactory imagery, suggested by the use of personal voices in the poem - two, clearly lovers (‘love-locks’) - drawn together in the second (male) speaker’s asking the other to ‘come with me […and] escape the uphill by never turning back’. Thus the landscape of the speakers’ proposed journey becomes a moral question in metaphor - asking them to choose, and thus implying the power of choice. This differs from Dickens’s character’s experience; they are given no choice in their journey, as they are subject to the ‘very speed at which the train’ they travel on, moves through the landscape.This is reinforced by Dickens’s semantic field of speed. He builds this through extensive anaphora and asyndenton, listing the features of the landscape, from ‘fields’, ‘woods’, and ‘hay’ of the countryside to that of the suburbs and city, ‘the park’, ‘the barge’, and even into the very bedrock of the earth: ‘through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock’. This is in strong contrast to Rossetti’s more focalised scene where two lovers dwell in ‘glowing August weather’ and take their time considering what the world around them means: the moral implications of their situation is symbolically alluded to in the image of the ‘meteor sent us’, and the female speaker’s repeated exclamative ‘Oh’s and rhetorical questions (often imbued with sexual connotations, ‘riven just at the rainy skirt?’, and foreboding sensory imagery, ‘scent comes rich and sickly?’). Rossetti’s speakers take their time and are given repeated moments of reflection, emphasising their power of choice, whereas Dickens’s protagonist is drawn by an ‘inexorable force’: the train. 

This ‘force’ not only tears through the landscape and its passenger’s capacity to enjoy it; it is also a metaphor for life, or rather the ‘triumphant monster Death’. The train is personified (‘power that forced itself upon its iron way - its own’), ‘dragging creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it’, ‘inexorably to [the] foredoomed end’ - the closing of the journey of life. Dickens’s protagonist is also referred to in the third person, emphasising their lack of power and their being subject to external imposing forces (like the ‘power that forced itself upon its iron way - its own’), unlike Rossetti’s speakers who are afforded the use of their own voices, both in positing their moral position (‘we shall escape the uphill by never turning back’), the questioning of this, and its realisation: ‘this downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back’. 

Yet, Dickens’s and Rossetti’s use of voice may also reveal similarities. In Dickens’s extract, the rhythm of the train (or ‘Death’) almost overtakes human means of expression: overpowering the language of the extract itself in the thick asyndenton and extensive anaphora. Consistently we return to the same clauses, ‘away and still away’, ‘away with a shriek, a roar, and a rattle’ - mimicking the sound of a train travelling, but also suggesting a limiting of human expression through the extreme repetition. Likewise, whilst Rossetti’s speakers are given more of a sense of choice and power in their actions, they are not evenly weighted: the male voice consistently cuts off the female’s questioning of the path they have chosen. She is disempowered, like Dickens’s protagonist, despite the differences of their context.