In your essay, you should:

• Analyze how Causley's use of imagery and sensory detail (like the picnic setting, light, color, and landscape) fosters a tone of tranquility and familiarity.
• Examine how the characterization of the speaker's parents — their everyday, domestic actions — softens the poem's exploration of death.
• Explore the significance of the poem's final line ("I had not thought that it would be like this") and what it implies about the speaker's — and the reader's — perceptions of death.
• Consider how structural and linguistic choices (such as enjambment, shifts in tense, and the use of the second person in the final stanza) enhance the poem's overall meaning.

Assessment Guidance

Your response should be well-organized, presenting a clear argument supported by close textual references and analysis of language, form, and structure.