Grade 9 Notes: Love and Relationships — all fifteen poems

What is this exam testing?

Love and Relationships is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), Paper 2, Section B. The paper sets a single comparative question on the cluster. It names one poem and prints it, and asks you to compare it with one other poem from the same cluster — your choice, and not printed. The anthology is not allowed in the examination, so the second poem comes from memory. That one rule shapes everything else: you need a ready partner for whichever poem appears, and enough exact detail about that partner to analyse it as closely as the poem in front of you. Three objectives are credited. On 8702 AO3 means context — how a poem relates to the world it was written in and read in. Comparing is not a separate objective on this board; it is what the question asks you to do, and it is rewarded through the strength of your argument (AO1) and the precision of your analysis (AO2).

AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)

One compulsory comparison worth 30 marks on the cluster you have studied; there is no choice of question within the cluster. The named poem is printed on the paper; the partner poem is chosen by you and written about from memory, because the paper is closed book. Plan on about 45 minutes. Credit comes from AO1, AO2 and AO3. AO4 (spelling, punctuation and grammar) is not credited on this question, so put your effort into the thinking and the evidence rather than ornament.

AO1 · Informed personal response, supported by references (22.5% of the GCSE, on Paper 2 as a whole)

What the examiner wants: One sustained argument that holds both poems and answers the question's focus — desire, a parent and child, the end of a love, power inside a relationship, memory. References to the printed poem can be exact; references to the partner must be accurate from memory, either as short exact fragments or as precise descriptions of a moment. The examiner is reading a single line of thought about two poems, not two separate commentaries placed one after the other.

Scoring highly: Put a comparative claim in your first sentence that someone could argue with — for example, that Byron and Hardy both remember a love's ending in cold, colourless images, but Byron's speaker is still trapped inside the grief while Hardy's has hardened it into a rule about love. Then make every paragraph test that claim in both poems. Evidence from the partner should be small and exact: two or three words recalled correctly, or one moment described closely enough to find on the page.

Top band vs the band below: The strongest answers compare attitudes and methods, not topics. They choose a partner that creates a real disagreement with the named poem, and they let the pairing show something neither poem shows alone. They also keep interpretations open where the poems are open — who the man in Letters from Yorkshire is, whether the farmer's last lines are longing or threat — and weigh a second reading instead of forcing one meaning.

The common mistake: Two essays in one: a long account of the printed poem, then a short paragraph beginning with similarly. Almost as costly is choosing a partner because it is the poem you remember best rather than the poem that argues with the named one, which leads to comparisons of subject only — both poems are about love — that earn very little.

In your essay: Before you write, decide the pairing and write one line of common ground and three points of difference in attitude or method. Those differences are your paragraphs. Each paragraph opens with a comparative claim, proves it in both poems and ends on what the contrast reveals.

AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology (27.5% of the GCSE, on Paper 2 as a whole — the largest objective)

What the examiner wants: Close analysis of how each poet's choices make meaning — a word, an image, a line ending, a stanza shape, the design of the whole poem — in both poems. At cluster level it means knowing in advance each poem's most valuable method: Byron's circle back to the opening words, Shelley's list of nature ending on a question, Browning's calm monologue, Barrett Browning's sonnet that turns from thinking to presence, Hardy's frame, Mew's breaking final stanza, Day-Lewis's images of things leaving their source, Causley's shrinking stanzas, Heaney's reversal, Armitage's tape measure, Duffy's present tense for a past the speaker never saw, Sheers's tercets that end in a couplet, Nagra's two choruses, Waterhouse's single unbroken climb, Dooley's shift of pronouns.

Scoring highly: Use exact terms — dramatic monologue, Petrarchan sonnet, volta, extended metaphor, refrain, enjambment, caesura, frame, tercet, couplet, half-rhyme — and always join the term to what it does in this poem. Give form and structure as much weight as imagery: they are where comparisons are sharpest, because two structures can be set against each other in a single sentence.

Top band vs the band below: In the best answers the methods carry the argument. It is not enough that Browning writes a regular monologue and Mew an irregular one; the point is that Browning's steady pattern holds a murder inside perfect control, while Mew's stanza breaks apart at the moment the farmer's desire threatens to break its restraint — so each form is a claim about the man speaking. These answers move upward from one word to the shape of the whole poem.

The common mistake: Listing techniques in both poems without saying what any of them does. Writing that both poets use enjambment earns almost nothing; explaining why Sheers's sentences run across his stanza breaks like a walk that does not stop, while Byron's short lines keep stopping like someone holding back tears, earns a great deal.

In your essay: Each paragraph: a precise piece of evidence from each poem, the method named, its effect argued, the contrast drawn. Make one paragraph about form or structure, and keep the two poems near equal in depth.

AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poems and their worlds (7.5% of the GCSE, on Paper 2 as a whole)

What the examiner wants: How the worlds of the poems shape what they mean: a society where reputation could be destroyed by gossip, the Victorian ideal of female purity, a sonnet tradition that gave men the voice and women the silence, rural marriage in which a young wife had little power to leave, a craft of horse-ploughing that was disappearing, the mid-twentieth-century dance hall and the expectation that motherhood would end a young woman's freedom, a new British identity built from two cultures. On 8702 AO3 is context; on Pearson Edexcel 4ET1 the same code means comparison. Codes never carry across boards.

Scoring highly: Fix context to a word or a moment in one clause. For example: in a society where a good name could be ruined by rumour, Byron's ‘light is thy fame’ is not a passing remark but a social disgrace the speaker shares in secret. Context is credited when it changes what a line means; a paragraph of history or biography is not.

Top band vs the band below: The strongest answers make context comparative. They use the two poems' worlds to explain why the poems differ — a Victorian woman taking the sonnet's voice and commanding her beloved, against a Romantic man borrowing a serious idea of nature to win a kiss — so context explains the difference between the poems rather than decorating each one separately.

The common mistake: Attaching a block of background to nothing. Equally damaging is confident invented biography: if you are not sure of a fact about a poet's life, leave it out. For the in-copyright poems especially, the world the poem shows — a school field, an empty house, a family shop, a lake in winter — is safer and more useful than anything about the poet.

In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each attached to a moment, each changing its meaning, at least one explaining why the two poems differ.

Examiner insight. Because the partner poem is not printed, the examiner can tell straight away whether it was prepared. Short, accurate evidence, a clear account of the poem's structure and a sense of the whole poem show preparation; long, half-remembered lines and loose summary show its absence. Four or five partners prepared in depth are worth far more than fifteen prepared thinly.

Avoid. Do not bring the 4ET1 rules into this paper. On 4ET1 AO3 is comparison and context earns nothing in the poetry question; on 8702 AO3 is context, and comparison is the task itself. A student trained never to mention context in poetry will leave credit unclaimed here.

Section B at a glance

The themes

Context

How context works across the cluster (AO3 on 8702)

On 8702 AO3 is context, and in the poetry comparison it is credited when it changes what a poem means. The cluster runs from Byron's first publication in 1816 to poems written in living memory, so context is often the clearest way to explain why two poems disagree. Think of it in four layers.

1 · When the poems were written. Six poems come from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Byron's was first published in 1816; Shelley's was first printed in December 1819; Robert Browning's in 1836; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850; Hardy's poem is dated 1867 but was not published until 1898; Mew's appeared in 1916 as the title poem of her first collection. The other nine are modern and in copyright. For them no date is needed — and none should be guessed — because their worlds are visible on the page: a school playing field, an empty house, a dance hall, a family shop, a winter lake.

2 · What the world allowed a relationship to be. Several poems press against the rules of their time. Byron's speaker lives in a society where a reputation could be destroyed by gossip and a love affair had to be secret, and where the double standard fell hardest on women. Browning's speaker kills to keep Porphyria fixed as perfectly pure and good, a Victorian ideal of womanhood turned into a motive. Barrett Browning takes a form in which men spoke and women were silent, and uses it to command. Mew's bride was married young and quickly in a rural world where a wife had little power to leave, and her flight is ended by the whole community. Duffy's mother belongs to a time when a young woman's nights at the dance hall were expected to end with motherhood.

3 · Families and the way they change. The modern family poems are full of ordinary thresholds: a child's first going off to school in Walking Away, a young adult's first home in Mother, any distance, a grandchild's frank curiosity about an old body in Climbing My Grandfather. Follower records horse-drawn ploughing, a skilled craft that tractors were already replacing, and a child who grew up behind the plough without ever taking it over. Singh Song! shows a younger British Sikh generation making its own life inside a family business and between two cultures. Eden Rock draws on one of the oldest images in human culture — death as a crossing of water — and on its title's echo of the first garden.

4 · How a poem first met its readers. Love's Philosophy was first printed in a weekly paper edited by Leigh Hunt, The Indicator, and one of Shelley's own manuscripts calls it an Anacreontic — a light love song in an ancient Greek style. Porphyria's Lover first appeared under the signature Z and was later grouped with another monologue under the heading Madhouse Cells, a heading Browning afterwards removed. Neutral Tones waited thirty-one years between its date and its publication. Letters from Yorkshire was chosen for Poems on the Underground, so its picture of a February garden reached commuters on London trains — readers very like its own indoor speaker.

The rules for using context are the same in every pairing. Attach it to a moment, in a clause. Make it change the reading. Wherever you can, make it comparative: writing within a tradition where women were the silent subject of sonnets, Barrett Browning can make a woman command her beloved, while Shelley, borrowing a Romantic faith in a united nature, makes his man argue for a kiss — two worlds explaining two kinds of desire. A paragraph about Victorian marriage on its own is not credited.

Avoid. Do not invent biography and do not state a date you are not sure of. For the nine in-copyright poems nothing in your essay depends on a year, and a wrong one damages the sentence around it. Never assume that a speaker is the poet, or that a poem records the poet's own family: the poem's world is always safer, and more useful, than the poet's life.

Examiner insight. AO3 is the smallest of the three objectives on this question, but it is credited, and many candidates write none. Two or three well-placed clauses, each attached to a moment, are enough.

Form, voice and comparison

How Section B works on 8702 — and why the partner must live in your head

The mechanics first. The paper sets one question on the cluster, and there is no choice. It names one Love and Relationships poem, prints it, and asks you to compare it with one other poem from the cluster on a focus such as romantic love, the relationship between parent and child, memory, the end of a relationship, or power within one. Your partner poem is not printed. The question is worth 30 marks, takes about 45 minutes, and is credited through AO1, AO2 and AO3.

Two things follow. First, any of the fifteen could be printed, so each needs a partner you have prepared. Second, the partner must be one you can write about accurately from memory. The best partner is the one that genuinely argues with the named poem AND that you can bring to life without the book — which is why this resource gives you a matrix of pairings and a method for building a kit of partners you know deeply.

Choosing in ninety seconds

• Read the focus and the printed poem. What does the named poem think about that focus — not just what is it about?
• Find the poem's row in the matrix: best partner, second partner.
• Check your kit. Which of those can you evidence precisely — exact fragments for a public-domain poem, exact moments for an in-copyright one? Choose that one.
• Look for a contrast of method worth a paragraph: voice, form or structure. If the two poems only share a subject, think again.
• Write the plan: common ground in a line, three differences of attitude or method, one context clause for each poem.

Avoid. Do not choose a partner you cannot evidence. A clever pairing supported by vague memory produces vague paragraphs; a sound pairing supported by precise detail produces a sustained comparison. Your memory is part of the choice.

The Comparison Matrix — a partner for every poem

Fifteen poems, their strongest pairings, and the argument each pairing opens up

Treat this table as prepared openings. For any poem the paper might print you hold a best partner, a second partner in case the question's focus suits it better, and the comparison already phrased as an ARGUMENT. That two poems are both about love is a fact, and facts earn little; common ground with a decisive difference earns a great deal.

The matrix

Examiner insight. Each pairing is defensible and most can be reversed, so either poem could be the printed one. The one-line arguments are seeds rather than scripts: add a method comparison (voice, form or structure), precise evidence from both poems and a context clause for each, and any row becomes the spine of an essay.

Choosing from memory — building your partner kit

The most valuable revision for this question is a partner kit: four or five poems you know well enough to analyse closely and describe structurally with no text in front of you. A well-chosen kit gives you a strong partner for every poem in the cluster.

A kit should cover the cluster's main conversations. One example: Neutral Tones (endings, memory, nature, faith), Porphyria's Lover (possession, desire, power, voice), Sonnet 29 (desire, presence, nature, gender), Follower (parent and child, memory, ageing) and Mother, any distance (letting go, distance, home). Between them they reach every one of the fifteen with a real argument. Another strong kit swaps Neutral Tones for When We Two Parted and Mother, any distance for Walking Away.

Two kinds of kit poem need two kinds of preparation. For the six public-domain poems — Byron, Shelley, Robert Browning, Barrett Browning, Hardy and Mew — these notes give short exact fragments you can learn and use. For the nine in-copyright poems Incandio quotes nothing, so the notes give you precise MOMENTS instead: describe the moment closely enough that an examiner can find it on the page — the father's shoulders swelling like a sail, the tape stretched to the loft hatch, the hands folding together like wings. A precise description is good evidence; a half-remembered line is not. If one of those poems is printed on your paper, quote it from the paper.

What to carry for each kit poem

• Four to six pieces of exact evidence: short fragments for a public-domain poem, precisely described moments for an in-copyright one — each able to serve more than one question.
• One structural fact you can describe without the text: Byron's return to his opening words, Browning's switch into the present tense, Barrett Browning's first line reversed in her last, Hardy's frame, Heaney's reversal, Armitage's climb through the house.
• One clear attitude, in a sentence: what the poem thinks about love or family.
• One or two context clauses that change a reading.
• Its best three partners from the matrix.

Grade 9 insight. Revise each kit poem's METHOD hardest. Evidence changes with the question; a structural argument travels to every question. Sheers's tercets ending in a couplet, Causley's shrinking stanzas, Byron's circle — each of these can carry a paragraph whatever the focus.

Avoid. A poem that fits every question fits none of them perfectly. If the paper prints Walking Away and asks about the relationship between parent and child, Mother, any distance beats Neutral Tones even if both could be made to work. Run the choosing drill first and use the kit as a safety net.

Comparing methods, not just subjects

Middling answers compare what two poems say. Strong answers compare how they are made. Three method comparisons carry almost any pairing in this cluster: voice against voice, form against form, structure against structure.

Voice against voice. Ask who speaks, to whom, and whether we can trust them. Browning's killer and Mew's farmer speak in monologues that reveal more than they mean to; Nagra's husband speaks in a monologue that delights in exactly what it reveals. Byron's and Hardy's speakers address a former lover who cannot reply. Duffy's speaker and Armitage's speaker, both grown children, address their mothers directly. Dooley's speaker moves from describing the man to talking to him. Day-Lewis's parent and Heaney's grown child speak years after the moment they describe. Comparing voices is the quickest route into method and meaning together.

Form against form. Barrett Browning chose the Petrarchan sonnet, a form built for a man's longing, and gave it to a woman who commands. Armitage's poem is about a sonnet's length but loosened and stretched, like the tape. Shelley chose two matching stanzas that each end in a question; Byron chose very short lines that sound held back; Hardy chose quatrains whose last lines fall short; Browning held a murder inside a steady rhyme pattern; Mew let her stanzas vary and break. Day-Lewis bound each five-line stanza with a returning rhyme; Sheers ended six tercets with a couplet; Waterhouse wrote one unbroken stanza for one unbroken climb.

Structure against structure. Almost every poem has one structural fact worth a paragraph: Byron ends on his opening words; Shelley's verbs grow more physical from stanza to stanza; Browning moves into the present tense beside the body; Barrett Browning's last line contradicts her first; Hardy's last stanza steps forward in time and back to the pond; Mew's space for the bride shrinks from open fields to a locked house to one room up a stair; Causley's stanzas shrink from four lines to one; Heaney saves his reversal for the end; Duffy closes on her title; Nagra's day-time chorus gives way to a night-time one.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Both poems end by going back to the start.

Write: Both poems end where they began, but the circle means opposite things. Byron's last line repeats his first stanza's silence and tears, so even an imagined future meeting becomes the old parting again — a grief with no exit. Duffy's last words repeat her title, returning to the years before the speaker's birth — the one place the child can never enter, where the mother stays free.

Difference inside similarity: The basic comparative move: establish real common ground — a subject, a method, a situation — and then find the exact point where the two poems part, in attitude, form or effect. The common ground gets you into the comparison; the difference is the essay.

The map of fifteen forms

Learn this map and every comparison gains a form paragraph. Each description stays at the level the poem's own Grade 9 Notes confirm, so you can state it with confidence from memory.

The fifteen forms

Grade 9 insight. The cluster's pattern of form in one sentence: the six older poems use inherited patterns of rhyme and stanza, and most of the nine newer ones use free verse and a speaking voice. The exceptions are where comparisons get sharp. Day-Lewis and Heaney keep regular rhyme for modern family memories; Armitage bends a sonnet; Sheers saves a couplet for the end; Mew, in the oldest group, lets her form come apart. A poem that keeps its pattern set against one that breaks it is an AO2 paragraph in itself.

The five comparison mistakes that cost the most

Avoid. Two essays bolted together. A long account of the printed poem and a short tail on the partner. The comparison is the task; every paragraph should carry one comparative idea through both poems.

Avoid. A lopsided pairing. The printed poem is on the desk, so it gets deep analysis and the partner gets summary. Prepare kit poems so the partner can be analysed just as closely from memory.

Avoid. Matching subjects without methods. That both poems are about a mother is true and worth almost nothing. Turn every shared subject into a comparison of voice, form, structure or a single precise detail.

Avoid. Loose evidence. A misremembered line is worse than an accurate description. For a public-domain poem, quote a few words exactly; for an in-copyright partner, describe the moment precisely in your own words.

Avoid. Context as decoration, or as gossip. A paragraph of background attached to nothing, or a claim that a poem is secretly about the poet's own life. Context earns credit only when it changes what a moment means.

Examiner insight. All five come from one habit: writing the essay you revised instead of the one the question asks for. The question's focus must appear in your first sentence and steer every paragraph's comparative claim.

Beyond the Syllabus — Information to Shock the Examiner

Cluster-level ideas — used selectively, one per essay at most

The cluster contains a husband and a wife. Robert Browning wrote Porphyria's Lover, first printed in 1836. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese were written during her courtship with him, and they married in 1846. Set the two poems side by side and the cluster stages a strange conversation between them: his speaker kills to keep a woman fixed at one perfect moment; her speaker throws away her fixed image of the beloved because she wants the living man. One clause of this, in an essay pairing the two, shows real range.

Porphyria's Lover was once filed under madness. When Browning reprinted the poem, he grouped it with another monologue under the heading Madhouse Cells, and later removed the heading. So the question every class argues about — is the speaker mad? — is one the poet himself first answered and then chose to leave open. The more disturbing reading is the one without the label: a speaker whose possessiveness is an extreme of ordinary attitudes rather than an illness.

Neutral Tones waited thirty-one years. Hardy's poem is dated 1867 but reached readers only in 1898, in Wessex Poems, his first book of verse, after his career as a novelist. Whatever its origins, the last stanza's claim that later lessons have shaped the memory arrived across decades — which makes the speaker's admission that his memory has been shaped worth one clause: the colourless pond may be partly bitterness painted back onto the past.

Love's Philosophy calls itself a joke. One of Shelley's manuscripts heads the poem as an Anacreontic, a light love song in the manner of an ancient Greek poet, and it was first printed in a weekly paper. A grand title for a poem that is really a request for a kiss: the philosophy is serious Romantic thought put to a small, urgent use. Reading the title as half ironic lets an essay hold both the playfulness and the frustration.

Three poems are circles, and they mean three different things. Byron ends on his opening words, so the future repeats the past; Hardy frames his memory at the pond, so the speaker returns to it whenever love hurts; Duffy ends on her title, the years before the speaker's birth. A circle can be a trap, a habit or a refuge. Naming all three, and choosing which your pairing shows, is the kind of structural thinking few answers reach.

Letters from Yorkshire was read underground. The poem was chosen for Poems on the Underground, displayed among the adverts in London trains. Its readers were commuters surrounded by news, indoors and far from any field — almost exactly its own speaker. Present this as context for the poem's question about which life is more real: it was put in front of the very readers who might ask it.

Thesis statements

• When We Two Parted and Neutral Tones both remember the end of a love through cold, deathly images and return at the close to where they began, but Byron's circle keeps the speaker inside a grief still felt, while Hardy's frame lets his speaker step outside it and harden one ending into a law that love deceives.
• Porphyria's Lover and The Farmer's Bride both let a man condemn himself out of his own mouth as he describes taking a woman's freedom, but Browning's speaker has already turned possession into murder and tells it with perfect calm, while Mew's farmer ends at the foot of a stair, his desire unresolved and his control breaking.
• Love's Philosophy and Sonnet 29 both make nature carry a lover's longing, but Shelley's speaker is outside the love and argues for a kiss that is never given, while Barrett Browning's is inside a returned love and commands her beloved to replace her thoughts with his presence.
• Walking Away and Mother, any distance both measure the love between parent and child as a distance that must grow, but Day-Lewis speaks as the parent who has to let go and calls that letting go love, while Armitage speaks as the grown child who is leaving and ends with the bond stretched to its limit but not yet broken.
• Follower and Climbing My Grandfather both make an older man in the family vast through a sustained physical image, but Heaney's admiration ends in a reversal that leaves an old father stumbling behind his grown child, while Waterhouse's climb ends at rest on the summit, in warmth and a slow heartbeat.
• Neutral Tones and Winter Swans both set a troubled couple beside cold water in winter, but Hardy's pond becomes the permanent image of love's failure, while Sheers's lake gives his couple a model of two birds who right themselves, and their hands join without a word.
• Across the cluster the person who is loved almost never speaks, and the few poems in which they do — Winter Swans, Eden Rock, Singh Song! — are the ones in which love is answered rather than remembered, argued for or imposed.

Essay plans

How does Browning present power in a relationship in Porphyria's Lover and one other poem from Love and Relationships? — chosen partner: The Farmer's Bride

Thesis: Both poems give the voice to a man who wants to own a woman who resists him, and both let his own words convict him. But Browning's speaker has already acted, and tells a murder with a calm that never breaks, while Mew's farmer has hunted and imprisoned his wife and ends in a present tense of desire that is still rising — so one poem shows power completed, and the other shows it waiting.

1. Open with the form both poets share. Both are dramatic monologues, and both speakers reveal more than they intend. Browning's speaker is articulate and reasoning: he tells how he ‘debated what to do’ and then ‘found / A thing to do’. Mew's farmer speaks a plain rural dialect and explains himself with practical excuses — there was more to do at harvest than ‘bide and woo’. Compare the effect: Browning's eloquence makes his calm chilling; Mew's plainness makes the farmer's actions sound like ordinary local practice. AO3: Browning's poem was first grouped under the heading Madhouse Cells; Mew's farmer is supported by a whole community, which suggests that what he does was not seen as madness at all.
2. Compare how each woman's freedom is taken. Porphyria arrives as the most active person in the poem — she glides in, shuts out the storm, makes the fire blaze, lays the speaker's cheek on her shoulder — and is turned into an object he arranges: he opens her eyes and props her head on his shoulder instead. Mew's bride ran from a marriage that frightened her, was chased ‘flying like a hare’ and locked in: ‘turned the key upon her, fast’. In both poems the man reports taking a woman's freedom without any sense that it needs explaining, which is exactly what condemns him.
3. Compare what each speaker wants. Browning's speaker wants Porphyria fixed at the moment she ‘worshipped’ him, ‘Perfectly pure and good’; the repeated ‘mine, mine’ shows possession overtaking love. Mew's farmer wants a wife who will not come near him; his similes — ‘Shy as a leveret’, ‘like a mouse’ — show him seeing her as a wild creature to be caught and kept. AO3: a Victorian ideal of female purity in one poem and, in the other, a rural marriage where a young wife had little power to leave.
4. Compare the endings and the forms. Browning's regular pattern never falters, and the poem ends in the present tense beside the body — ‘thus we sit together now’ — with a last line about God's silence that is either triumph or the first trace of fear. Mew's final stanza breaks into exclamations, dashes and repetition as the farmer thinks of the bride asleep only a stair away, and ends on ‘her hair, her hair!’ Conclude that the pairing shows power at two stages: Browning's completed and calmly told, Mew's unresolved and audibly losing control — and that the second may be more frightening because it has not ended.

How does Hardy present the end of a relationship in Neutral Tones and one other poem from Love and Relationships? — chosen partner: When We Two Parted

Thesis: Both poems remember the end of a love in cold, colourless images and both return at the close to where they started. But Byron's speaker is still caught inside a secret grief that cannot be spoken, while Hardy's has stepped out of the memory and turned it into a bitter rule — so one poem shows grief that will not end and the other shows grief that has hardened into knowledge.

1. Open with the cold. Byron's parting is remembered through a pale cheek, a cold kiss and dew that ‘Sunk chill on my brow’, read in hindsight as a warning. Hardy's scene has a white sun ‘chidden of God’ and leaves on ‘the starving sod’. Both poets drain the colour from a love's ending; compare what the cold does — in Byron it foretells a future sorrow, in Hardy it records a love already dead.
2. Compare the lovers. Byron's beloved has broken vows, and their reputation is now spoken of lightly — ‘light is thy fame’ — while the speaker hears the name as ‘A knell to mine ear’. Hardy's lover is not accused of betrayal at all: her eyes rove over him like ‘tedious riddles solved years ago’, and her smile is ‘the deadest thing’. AO3: Byron's world of reputation and secret affairs explains why the speaker cannot grieve in public; Hardy's poem, dated 1867 and published in 1898, waited decades, which supports reading its last stanza as a lesson confirmed over years.
3. Compare the structures. Byron's last stanza imagines meeting again and asks ‘How should I greet thee?’ — then answers with the first stanza's ‘silence and tears’, so the future simply repeats the past. Hardy's last stanza begins with a move forward in time and then returns to the pond, sun and tree. Both are circular, but Byron's circle is a trap the speaker is still inside; Hardy's frame is a memory the speaker revisits to prove a point.
4. Compare the conclusions each speaker draws. Byron's draws none: the poem ends in the same silence it began with. Hardy's draws a general law — that ‘love deceives’ — and the sun that was scolded has become ‘the God-curst sun’. Conclude that the pairing shows two ways of living after a love ends: still feeling it, or having turned it into bitterness; and suggest that Hardy's admission that later lessons have shaped the memory lets a reader doubt how fair his picture of the lover is.

How does Day-Lewis present the relationship between a parent and a child in Walking Away and one other poem from Love and Relationships? — chosen partner: Mother, any distance

Thesis: Both poems catch a parent and child at the moment of separation and give that moment a physical image of distance. But Day-Lewis tells it from the parent who must let go, and arrives at a lesson about love, while Armitage tells it from the grown child who is leaving, and stops at the edge of an answer — so one poem looks back on separation understood, and the other stands inside separation as it happens.

1. Open with voice and time. Walking Away is a parent remembering, eighteen years later, the day a small child played a first football match and then drifted off towards school behind a crowd of boys. Mother, any distance is a grown child speaking in the present to the mother as they measure the speaker's new house. Neither poem says whether its speaker or child is male or female. Compare the effect: Day-Lewis's distance in time lets the parent reflect; Armitage's present moment keeps the reader inside the experience. Both poems are in copyright, so evidence here is described, never quoted.
2. Compare the images of distance. Day-Lewis reaches for images of things leaving their source — a satellite pulled loose from its orbit, a young bird not yet fully feathered, a winged seed drifting from its plant — which move from frightening to hopeful. Armitage builds one extended metaphor: the tape measure, with the mother holding its start while the speaker carries it up the house, then the anchor and the kite. AO3: starting school as one of the first real separations; leaving home as one of the great thresholds of early adult life.
3. Compare form and structure. Day-Lewis binds each five-line stanza with a returning rhyme and moves from memory to reflection to a closing lesson. Armitage's poem is about the length of a sonnet but loosened, its lines lengthening as the tape does, and its movement is upward through the house, from the ground floor to the open hatch. One structure arrives at understanding; the other climbs towards a choice.
4. Compare the endings. Day-Lewis's speaker concludes that growing into your own person starts with leaving, and that a parent's love shows in releasing the child, though the speaker admits the memory still troubles them. Armitage's speaker reaches the hatch with the tape almost at its end and the mother still holding the last fraction of it, facing an open sky and a choice between falling and flying. Conclude that the pairing shows both sides of one experience: the parent's painful acceptance and the child's excited, uncertain step — and that neither poem lets the bond break.

Carry on

• The Complete Guide to Love and Relationships — the whole text, told properly, in 16 chapters.
• The anthology as one system: Grade 9 Notes — the themes that bind the sixteen, the strongest pairings, and how to choose the second poem in the comparative essay.
• Love and Relationships — all fifteen poems · All set texts · The 4ET1 specification