Read carefully the poem on the opposite page. The speaker is working a night shift in a bakery, alone with the ovens in the hours before dawn while the town...

Notes for examiners

This is an original unseen poem; candidates come to it without preparation and are rewarded for what they make of it, not for reaching any fixed reading. The question asks how the poet strikingly conveys the speaker's experience of the night shift, so the discriminator is the quality of engagement with the writing itself: the selection of detail, the weighing of individual words, and the tracing of the poem's movement from the emptied town of the opening to the arriving light of the close. Answers that narrate what the baker does, however accurately, cannot reach the higher bands.

The three bullets are scaffolding. A candidate who ignores them and argues a coherent case of their own is not penalised, and a candidate who works steadily through all three without ever commenting on effect is not thereby rewarded.

Areas a strong answer is likely to explore

• The emptied town. The personification of "the town lets go of itself" and of the bus that "sighs its doors shut" hands agency to the sleeping world and leaves the speaker among the few things still working. The unexplained "there is only us" gives the night a small, undefined company.
• The bakery as its own climate. "the ovens breathing their long orange breath" animates the machinery and makes the heat continuous; "the flour that hangs in the air like weather" is the poem's boldest early image, enlarging a small indoor room into a whole atmosphere the speaker simply lives inside.
• The dough as a living thing. "warm as an animal, / slack, unwilling" gives the material a will, so the kneading becomes a contest; "until it agrees to hold its shape" completes the animation. The simile "the way you fold a letter you cannot send" is the poem's strangest move, attaching private, unspoken feeling to a repetitive physical task, and the shift into "you" briefly implicates the reader.
• Invisible labour. The flat monosyllabic "Nobody is awake to want this." and the quiet paradox of "people still dreaming of bread". Naming "the woman at number nine" makes the unknowing consumer concrete, and "somebody stood in the dark and made it" erases the speaker into the third person at exactly the point where recognition is withheld.
• Sentence length and the stalling of time. The fourth stanza abandons the long unwinding lines for three short sentences: "The mixer knocks. My back keeps its own time." The clipped rhythm enacts the slowest hour. The radio "talks to nobody, low, / a voice from a country three hours ahead" widens the poem, placing the speaker out of step with a world where it is already morning, and "The clock forgets to move" closes the stanza on gently hyperbolic stalled time.
• The turn and the close. "Then, at four" is signalled plainly, and the lines lengthen again. "the smell of something finished" carries relief without naming it; "the street begins to grey at its edges" arrives slowly and without drama. The last image keeps the labour visible in the moment of rest ("my arms floured to the elbow"), and the final line lends the dawn the vocabulary of the trade, since it is dough that is "certain of its rising" as much as the light.
• Form. Free verse with stanzas that contract from five lines to four and then open out to six; no rhyme scheme is imposed, so the poem's shape is carried by sentence and image rather than by pattern. Candidates who notice the contraction and the reopening, and connect it to the shape of the night, should be well rewarded.

Worked model answer

The poem's first move is to empty the town of everyone but the speaker. "At one o'clock the town lets go of itself" makes the town the subject of a verb of release, as though sleep were something it chooses rather than something that happens to it, and the personification quietly transfers all the agency in the scene away from the speaker. Even the bus is given a human weariness: it "sighs its doors shut at the depot" before "there is only us". That "us" is never explained. The poet gains from the omission, because the reader learns only that the speaker belongs to a small awake minority, never how small.

What fills the emptied town is atmosphere rather than event. The ovens are "breathing their long orange breath", where "long" does as much work as the colour, stretching the line and making the heat something exhaled continuously through the night rather than switched on. Bolder still is the flour that "hangs in the air like weather". Weather is vast and outdoors; a bakery at one in the morning is small and enclosed. The simile makes the room its own climate, and suggests that the flour is not a detail of the speaker's work but the condition they live inside, so total that it is no longer noticed.

The second stanza turns from the room to the hands, and the writing becomes physical. "I sink my hands to the wrist in it" is a verb of submersion rather than of skill, and what the speaker sinks into is described as though it were alive: "warm as an animal, / slack, unwilling". The dough resists, so the kneading becomes a small contest of wills, and the line "until it agrees to hold its shape" finishes the idea by granting the dough consent. Between these two moments comes the poem's most surprising image. The speaker folds the dough "the way you fold a letter you cannot send". A repetitive, unremarkable action is suddenly attached to something private and unresolved, and the slide from "I" into "you" pulls the reader into the comparison. Nothing in the poem explains the letter, and that reticence is the effect: the work is a way of doing something with feeling that has nowhere else to go, over and over, until it holds.

The third stanza turns bleak, and turns plain to do it. "Nobody is awake to want this." is a flat, almost entirely monosyllabic sentence after two stanzas of unwinding lines, and the full stop lands hard. What follows is a quiet paradox: the bread is "for people still dreaming of bread", so the sleepers both want it and cannot know they want it. Naming "the woman at number nine" gives that unknowing an address, which is far sharper than a general complaint about ingratitude would be. Most telling is the pronoun in "somebody stood in the dark and made it": at precisely the moment the speaker describes not being recognised, the poem stops saying "I" and calls the baker "somebody", performing the erasure it is describing.

In the fourth stanza the poet changes the pattern of the sentences to change the pace of the hour. Three short statements replace the long ones: "The mixer knocks. My back keeps its own time." The knock is the only event, and the back is given its own separate clock, so even the body has stopped agreeing with the night. The radio "talks to nobody, low, / a voice from a country three hours ahead" opens the poem outwards for a moment and reveals how far out of step the speaker is, since somewhere else the morning has already happened. Then "The clock forgets to move", a small hyperbole that turns the slowest hour of the shift into an actual failure of time.

The turn comes with a plain adverbial: "Then, at four, the trays go in". The lines lengthen again as the work reaches its result, and the shop fills "with the smell of something finished", an abstraction that carries relief without ever naming it. The dawn itself is undramatic: "the street begins to grey at its edges" is slow and partial, colour arriving at the margins rather than in a burst. The last picture keeps the labour visible inside the rest, since the speaker leans in the doorway "with my arms floured to the elbow" and is still wearing the night's work. Everything turns on the final word. The light comes up "slow, and certain of its rising", and "rising" belongs to bread before it belongs to the sun, so the poet lends the dawn the vocabulary of the trade and lets the speaker claim it as something they have made. The poem does not pretend this is happiness; the speaker is exhausted and leaning on a door frame. What it grants is a result, and that is enough to end on.

Band descriptors (25 marks)

Marks are awarded for the quality of the candidate's engagement with the poem, using the descriptors below. Examiners award the mark range that best fits the answer as a whole; there is no requirement to cover the bullets.

• 21-25: Sustained, perceptive and individual personal response. Confident critical understanding of the poem, including its implications. Sensitive, well selected and integrated reference to the text. Sustained analysis of the effects of the poet's language, structure and form, with an ear for the weight of particular words.
• 16-20: Clear and developed personal response. Clear understanding of the poem and of some of its deeper implications. Careful, relevant and mostly well integrated reference. Clear analysis of a number of the effects of the poet's language, structure and form.
• 11-15: Begins to develop a personal response. Understanding of the surface meaning of the poem, with some awareness of what lies beneath it. Appropriate reference and quotation, though at times used to retell rather than to argue. Some comment on the poet's language, where effects may be identified or asserted more often than analysed.
• 6-10: A little personal response. A little understanding, expressed mainly through narrative or paraphrase of what the speaker does. Occasional and sometimes undirected reference to the text. A little awareness that the poem has been written by someone making choices.
• 1-5: Limited response. Very limited understanding, seldom moving beyond repetition of the poem's content. Very limited or no supporting reference. No awareness of the poet's use of language.
• 0: No answerable content.