The Highwayman - Lesson 9 - Building Tension PowerPoint

In a comprehensive lesson focusing on 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes, students are tasked with exploring the literary techniques used to build tension within the poem. The lesson's objective is to deepen the students' understanding of how the poet skilfully creates a sense of suspense and drama through his writing. To achieve this, students are encouraged to delve into the poem up to stanza 13 and identify specific words, phrases, and sentence structures that contribute to the mounting tension. They are then guided to visually represent their findings by plotting the levels of tension on a graph, which helps them to conceptualise the gradual increase in intensity throughout the stanzas.

The lesson further instructs students to draw a tension graph that tracks the escalation of suspense from stanza 8 to stanza 13, using examples from the text such as "they bound a musket beside her" and "there was death at every window" to illustrate key moments of heightened drama. This graph serves as a visual aid to show the progression from calm to very tense, climaxing at the most dramatic points. Additionally, students are asked to write a paragraph analysing how Alfred Noyes builds tension, with prompts provided to support their responses. They are expected to consider the choice of language and sentence structure in their analysis, thereby gaining a richer understanding of the poetic devices that effectively create a charged atmosphere within the narrative poem.