Extra reading (not prescribed 2025–2027)

Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list)

Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list) is the poetry for English First Additional Language, Grade 12. Read the copy your school prescribed. This lesson does not replace that book.

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Grade 12 · English First Additional Language · Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list)

Literature answers from the text, in the shape the question asked for.

This page
Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list). Know the conflict, who wants what, and one theme you can prove from two moments. Grades 10 and 11 use the texts your school chose. Grade 12 uses the prescribed work your school entered. Read that copy. This lesson does not replace it.
Contextual question
Stay on the extract or the stanza you were given. If it says quote, the words must come from that extract. Then say what those words show. Point, evidence, explanation. Stop when you have as many points as there are marks.
Essay
The introduction names the text and answers the question. The body proves it with the book, not with the writer’s childhood. The last paragraph answers again and does not start a new scene. On Home Language you do not write two essays if the paper says the other genre must be contextual.
Poetry, seen and unseen
Name the theme in one sentence. Then one feature that is really there: an image, a refrain, a turn, a contrast. Say how that feature makes the theme felt. An unseen poem has no notes. Do not write a technique you cannot point to.

Paper 2 is 70 marks. Tone is not theme. A quotation with no comment earns only the quote. A life of the poet earns nothing unless the question asked for it.

Worked example

English First Additional Language, Grade 12. Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list). Answer it as literature: point, evidence, effect.

Simplified approach

Read the question’s verb. Stay inside Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list). One piece of evidence for each point.

Culture note

In a South African English First Additional Language class, Grade 12 literature is ordinary Paper 2 work. The prescribed copy stays the source.

Step 1 / 8

Overview

Prescribed poems (2015 EFAL list) is the poetry for English First Additional Language, Grade 12. Read the copy your school prescribed. This lesson does not replace that book.

Prescribed works

These are the Grade 12 works the Mind the Gap guides prepare. Your school chooses which novel, drama, or anthology you sit. Read that book. Copyrighted novels, plays, and poems are not pasted into Easified. Public-domain poems are printed in full below when this page is their anthology.

Sonnet 116 — William Shakespeare
Death be not proud — John Donne
An elementary school classroom in a slum — Stephen Spender
Auto wreck — Karl Shapiro
On his blindness — John Milton
A prayer for all my countrymen — Guy Butler
The birth of Shaka — Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali
The serf — Roy Campbell
Mementos, 1 — W.D. Snodgrass
Cheetah — Charles Eglington

Sonnet 116 — William Shakespeare (public domain)

Public domain. The other EFAL poems on this page are still in copyright. Use your anthology.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

More worked examples

Board walkthroughs on this topic. Open one, copy the working, then try the next.

Example 1 / 20

Paper 2, English First Additional Language. Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare. In two points, state the theme and name one feature of form. Then explain how that feature supports the theme.

4. Step-by-step working

01
Point
True love does not change when the loved one changes. The star is a fixed mark a ship can steer by.
theme
02
Apply the law
It is a Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The turn comes before the couplet.
form

How we got there

Read this like a teacher at the board. We go slowly, name every number, and say why we take each step.

Explain in another language · 11

1. What is the question asking?

Read the question twice. Circle the unknown. Underline every number and unit. The paper is asking: Paper 2, English First Additional Language. Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare. In two points, state the theme and name one feature of form. Then explain how that feature supports the theme.

In other words — as if you have never seen this before

If you have never seen this before: Point, evidence, effect. One sentence for the theme. One sentence for the form. One sentence that joins them. We will name a method in words, write the formula with no numbers, then substitute one line at a time.

2. What do we already know?

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare. Contextual question, not a plot summary.

3. Which method — and why this one?

Point, evidence, effect. One sentence for the theme. One sentence for the form. One sentence that joins them.

4. Step-by-step working

01 / 05
Point
True love does not change when the loved one changes. The star is a fixed mark a ship can steer by.
theme
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
02 / 05
Apply the law
It is a Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The turn comes before the couplet.
form
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
03 / 05
Sense-check
Join them: the form makes the reader feel the theme, so the feature is not decoration.
point+effect
Why this step: We only do one job per line so a marker can follow the marks — and so you can find a slip without starting over.
04 / 05
Step F — Box the answer with its unit
True love does not change when the loved one changes. The star is a fixed mark a ship can steer by. It is a Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The turn comes before the couplet.
Why this step: A number without a unit is half a mark on a Physics paper, and a marker can miss a Maths answer that is buried in working.
05 / 05
Step H — What the marker is looking for
On an NSC memo you usually earn: (1) a method mark for naming the right formula or idea in words, (2) an accuracy mark for substituting the given numbers with units, (3) an accuracy mark for the boxed answer with its unit. Write those three lines even if you are unsure of the arithmetic — blank pages score zero.
Why this step: First-timers chase the final number and leave the method blank. The memo still pays out for the idea and the substitution even when the last line is wrong.

5. The answer

True love does not change when the loved one changes. The star is a fixed mark a ship can steer by. It is a Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The turn comes before the couplet.

6. Check it like a marker

Do not call it a wedding poem only. “Marriage of true minds” is about constancy, not a ceremony.

7. A trap first-timers fall into

First-timers often grab the first formula they remember, mix units (cm with m, minutes with seconds), or drop a minus sign. Write the formula in words first: “this equals that, because…”

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