WORLDS AND LIVES
A Wider View
Looking beyond the limits of working life allows a descendant to recognise both an ancestor’s aspiration and a continuing connection.
Read the accessible text and study notes
What happens?
A city walk imaginatively joins a present-day speaker to an industrial ancestor.
Big idea
Looking beyond the limits of working life allows a descendant to recognise both an ancestor’s aspiration and a continuing connection.
“dreams”
Metaphorical elevation — Hope is imagined as something placed beyond polluted everyday surroundings.
“dust”
Sensory detail — Work enters the body, making industrial conditions materially present.
“echo”
Auditory image — The descendant’s steps seem to answer an earlier life.
“arcs”
Geometric verb — The final movement connects generations through a line that exceeds either individual.
Form
Free verse moves between a historical third-person account and a first-person present, ending in an imagined shared perspective.
Context
The poem locates family history in Leeds’s industrial buildings, including textile mills and the River Aire.
Compare
In a London Drawingroom: industrial restriction. Homing: heritage recovered in the present.
Voice, tone and feelings
Ancestor’s surroundings · Constrained but aspiring — Crowded housing and dangerous conditions give urgency to the desire for a broader horizon.
Walk after work · Imaginatively released — Looking at striking architecture briefly exceeds the narrowness of repetitive labour.
Descendant’s walk · Connected and expansive — The two periods meet in a vision that extends beyond a single lifetime.
Recall
How does the movement between times alter the meaning of the view?
Read the full poem in your own AQA anthology. Anthology information and source.