AQA GCSE in English Literature · Free · no account needed
Grade 9 Notes: Walking Away
Cecil Day-Lewis · A Love and Relationships poem on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Walking Away
Walking Away is a parent's memory of watching a young child walk away from the speaker. Eighteen years before, almost to the day, on a sunny autumn day, the speaker watched the child play a first game of football and then drift off towards school and out of sight behind a group of boys, small and uncertain, like something newly set free. The speaker has had worse partings, the poem says, but none that still gnaws like this one. In the last lines the speaker reaches for a meaning: that a self begins by walking away, and that love is proved by letting go. Revise it as a poem about the pain and the necessity of letting a child go. Notice the images of separation — a satellite torn from its orbit, a young bird not yet fully feathered, a winged seed drifting from its stem — and the movement from memory to reflection. The poem is in copyright and no quotation from it could be checked against the poet's or publisher's own text, so these notes quote nothing: every moment is described closely enough to find on the page. If the poem is printed on your paper, quote it from there.
Build your reading of Walking Away, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this page carries all three.
What is this exam testing?
Walking Away is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), as one of the fifteen poems in the Love and Relationships cluster on Paper 2. You meet it in one of two ways — printed on the paper as the named poem, or remembered as the poem you choose to set beside a different named poem. Both routes reward the same three things: an argument of your own (AO1), close attention to how the poem's language, form and structure make that argument (AO2), and context that genuinely changes how a line reads (AO3 — on this course AO3 means context, not comparison). For Walking Away that means a view about what the poem does with parenthood and separation, a set of precisely described moments, and one or two pieces of context — the ordinary ordeal of a child starting school, and ideas of growing up as a necessary separation — welded to a moment.
AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)
Section B asks one comparative question on the cluster. One poem is named and printed; you choose a second from the same cluster and write about it from memory. There is no separate mark for comparing: comparison is the task itself, credited through the quality of your argument and your analysis. Accuracy of spelling and grammar (AO4) is not credited on this question, though clear writing still carries the argument. On Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the same AO codes mean different things; never carry them across.
AO1 · A personal, critical response, supported by references
What the examiner wants: An argument about what the poem does with a parent's love and a child's independence, not a summary of a school day. The strongest answers ask why this small parting still hurts after eighteen years, and whether the final lesson consoles the speaker or only explains the speaker's pain.
Scoring highly: Range across the poem: the dated memory; the football game and the drifting away; the half-fledged creature set free; the winged seed; the speaker's admission that the memory still gnaws, years later; the closing lesson about selfhood and love. Keep a second poem in every paragraph.
Top band vs the band below: Top answers read the images as an argument: noticing that the child is compared to a satellite and a seed is an observation; arguing that every image shows something leaving its source in order to become itself, so the poem presents separation as the painful condition of growth, is a concept.
The common mistake: Writing only that the speaker is sad the child is growing up, without noticing that the poem ends by finding meaning — and possibly consolation — in that sadness.
In your essay: Open with a comparative thesis that names both poems and the difference that matters, then build three or four paragraphs that each hold both poems, and finish on what the pairing shows that neither poem shows alone.
AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology
What the examiner wants: Analysis of Day-Lewis's methods: images of space, birds and seeds; the movement from memory to reflection; the five-line stanzas with a recurring rhyme; enjambment that carries the child away across line ends; the shift from describing to understanding in the final stanza.
Scoring highly: Read the images as a sequence: a satellite, a fledgling, a seed — each is something that must leave where it began, and together they make the child's walking away natural, even necessary.
Top band vs the band below: The best answers notice the language of fire and clay: the small, scorching trials of childhood are imagined as firing a pot, hardening soft, uncertain material into something strong — so the pain of separation becomes part of making a person.
The common mistake: Naming metaphors without saying what they share or what they argue.
In your essay: In each paragraph name the method, pin down the words or moment doing the work, say what it does to a reader, then say what the partner poem does differently. Make at least one point about form or structure.
AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poem and the world it comes from
What the examiner wants: How the poem's world shapes it: the ordinary ordeal of a young child going off to school; a parent's experience of a child's growing independence; and a long tradition of describing parenthood as giving life and then giving it up. The poet, Cecil Day-Lewis, was Poet Laureate at the end of his life.
Scoring highly: One clause at a time: because starting school is one of the first real separations between parent and child, the speaker's memory of the child drifting off towards school past a group of boys marks the first step of a lifelong letting go.
Top band vs the band below: Context that generates a reading: because the poem is written eighteen years later, when the child is now fully grown, the speaker looks back on the first walking away knowing all the others that followed — so the small parting stands for every parting since.
The common mistake: Biography about the poet's family that the poem does not give.
In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each welded to a moment in a poem and each changing what that moment means. Never a paragraph of background on its own.
Avoid. Treating the poem as only sad. It ends with a hard-won understanding that letting go is itself an act of love.
Examiner insight. A strong comparative opening names a method: both Day-Lewis and Armitage describe a parent and child at a moment of separation, but Day-Lewis's speaker, a parent, watches a child drift away and finds meaning in letting go, while Armitage's speaker is the child moving away, held for a moment by a mother at the other end of a tape.
If you choose this as your partner poem, carry its shape: the dated memory; the football and the drifting away; the fledgling and the seed; the speaker's confession that it still gnaws at the speaker; the closing lesson.
The speaker and the figures
The speaker (a parent)
A parent who still remembers, eighteen years on, watching a young child walk away
The speaker is a parent looking back eighteen years to an ordinary autumn day. The poem never says whether the speaker is a mother or a father, or whether the child is a son or a daughter; many readers take it as a father remembering a son, but an essay should rest on what the poem says. The speaker watched the small child play a first game of football and then drift away towards school, out of sight behind a group of boys. The child seemed uncertain, newly set loose into a world where the way ahead could not be seen. The speaker reaches for images to explain what was seen — a satellite pulled out of its orbit, a fledgling bird, a winged seed — and admits that it cannot quite be put into words. The speaker has known worse partings, but none that still troubles them so much. In the last lines the speaker finds a meaning: that a person becomes themselves by walking away, and that love shows itself in letting go. The speaker is tender, honest and thoughtful, and the poem shows a parent still working through a pain that is understood but has not been escaped.
The memory
The poem begins by fixing the memory in time: eighteen years ago, almost to the day. The setting is a sunny day with leaves just beginning to turn, and the lines of a football pitch newly marked.
Key moment. The speaker dating the memory to eighteen years ago, almost to the very day (Stanza 1). The precision shows how vividly the moment has stayed with the speaker. A parent who can count the years almost to the day has never let this memory fade.
Key moment. The autumn setting, with sunshine and leaves only just beginning to turn (Stanza 1). Autumn is a season of change and endings, but the leaves are only beginning to turn. The setting hints at a first, gentle change — the start of a long process of letting go.
Key moment. The child, after a first football game, drifting away like a satellite pulled out of its orbit (Stanza 1). A satellite circles a planet; torn from its orbit, it drifts off into space. The child has circled the parent and now moves away. The image is vast and a little frightening, as if the child is drifting into emptiness.
Reflection and the lesson
In the second half of the poem the speaker moves from describing the scene to thinking about what it meant. The speaker admits the memory still troubles them and searches for words to explain it.
Key moment. The speaker admitting to having had worse partings, but none that still gnaws at the mind like this one (Stanza 4). A small, everyday parting has hurt more lastingly than larger ones. The verb of gnawing makes the memory a slow, persistent pain, like something chewing at the speaker.
Key moment. The speaker saying they can never quite manage to put into words what the moment taught them (Stanza 3). The speaker struggles to express it. The poem presents a feeling deeper than language — which is why it needs images.
Key moment. The closing idea that a self begins with a walking away and love is proved in letting go (Stanza 4). The poem's lesson: growing up requires separation, and a parent's love shows itself in allowing it. The ending turns pain into meaning.
How Day-Lewis builds the speaker in language and structure
The speaker's voice is reflective and honest. The speaker moves from a precise memory to a struggle for understanding, admitting what cannot quite be expressed.
The speaker reaches for a series of images from space, birds and plants. Each shows something leaving where it began, so the speaker's images make an argument: separation is natural.
The poem is written in five-line stanzas with a recurring rhyme that binds the first, third and fifth lines. The repeating sound holds the poem together as the speaker holds onto the memory.
The final stanza changes from description to reflection and ends on a compact, balanced statement — a kind of proverb — that resolves the poem's pain into a lesson.
The speaker in context
Starting school. A child's first days at school are one of the earliest real separations between parent and child. Most readers recognise the moment, and the poem's power comes partly from how ordinary it is.
The poet. Cecil Day-Lewis was an Irish-born English poet who became Poet Laureate in the last years of his life. The poem draws on a common human experience rather than on anything particular about him, and an essay should treat it that way.
Relationships
- The child — The child the speaker watched walk away eighteen years ago, now grown.
- Nature and God — The speaker reaches to nature's give and take, and to what only God could fully show, to explain the moment.
What The speaker (a parent) stands for
- The satellite: drifting out of a parent's orbit.
- The fledgling: a creature set free before it is ready.
- The winged seed: separation as the way new life begins.
Why Day-Lewis made The speaker (a parent)
- To capture the lasting pain of a small parting.
- To find meaning in a parent's loss of a child to independence.
- To present letting go as an act of love.
Other readings
- A loving parent who has accepted a hard truth.
- A parent still wounded, using the lesson as a way of self-consolation.
- A parent who sees in one moment the shape of all parenthood.
Essay arguments
- Day-Lewis presents a parent whose small, everyday parting from a child still hurts after eighteen years, because it was the first of many.
- The speaker's images of satellites, fledglings and seeds present the child's departure as natural and necessary as well as painful.
- The final lesson presents letting go as the proof of love, though the poem leaves open whether it fully consoles the speaker.
In theme essays
- Parenthood and letting go.
- Growing up and independence.
- Memory.
Questions that get asked
- How does Day-Lewis present the relationship between a parent and child in Walking Away and one other poem from Love and Relationships?
- Compare the ways poets show separation in Walking Away and one other poem.
The child
A small child drifting away from the speaker towards school and an independent life
The child is seen only through the speaker's memory. The child plays a first game of football, then drifts off towards school, out of sight behind a scatter of boys. The child seems small and unsure, like a young bird not yet fully feathered, set free into a wilderness where the path cannot be found. The child is described as hesitant, moving away in eddies, like a seed loosened from its stem. The child never speaks and never looks back in the poem. The child is eighteen years older now, fully grown, but in the speaker's memory is still that small figure walking away.
Leaving
Every image of the child shows the child leaving something behind and moving into something new and uncertain.
Key moment. The child walking away towards school with the pitiful look of a half-feathered young bird set free into a wilderness (Stanza 2). The child is not ready, and the world the child walks into is wild and pathless. The speaker sees the child's vulnerability as well as the child's freedom.
Key moment. The child walking like someone who finds no path where the path ought to be (Stanza 2). The child's uncertainty: the way ahead cannot be seen. The speaker watches and cannot help.
Key moment. The small hesitant figure eddying away like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem (Stanza 3). A seed must leave the parent plant to grow. The image makes the child's going away natural — the beginning of the child's own life — even as it hurts the speaker.
How Day-Lewis builds the child in language and structure
The child is never given a voice, a name or a look back. The child exists only in the speaker's watching.
The child is described through movement — drifting, walking away, eddying — which keeps the child always leaving.
Images of incompleteness — a half-feathered bird, a path that is not there — stress the child's vulnerability.
The child in context
Eighteen years. The child is eighteen years older at the time the poem is written, a young adult. Looking back on that first walking away, the speaker knows all the later separations that followed.
Growing up. The poem's ideas about growing up — that independence requires leaving, and that small trials harden a person — reflect a widely held view of childhood as a process of becoming separate.
Relationships
- The speaker (the parent) — Watches the child leave and remembers it eighteen years later.
What The child stands for
- The seed: new life that must leave its source.
- The fledgling: freedom before readiness.
Why Day-Lewis made The child
- To embody a child's first steps towards independence.
- To show a vulnerability the parent can only watch.
Other readings
- A vulnerable child leaving too soon.
- A child beginning to become a separate self.
- A figure fixed in a parent's memory.
Essay arguments
- The child is presented as small, hesitant and unready, so the child's walking away is both brave and pitiful.
- The child's departure is presented through images of natural growth, so leaving is how the child begins to become a separate self.
In theme essays
- Growing up and independence.
- Parenthood and letting go.
Questions that get asked
- How is the child presented in Walking Away?
- Compare the ways poets show children growing up and away from their parents.
The themes
Parenthood and letting go
Love proved by releasing a child.
The poem's central idea is stated in its final lines: love is shown by letting go. A parent's love is not only holding on but allowing a child to leave and become themselves. The speaker has learned this, but the poem shows how much it costs the speaker.
The poem gives the speaker no easy comfort. The memory still gnaws at the speaker after eighteen years. The lesson explains the pain but does not remove it. Love, in this poem, includes accepting a loss that never quite stops hurting.
The love described is selfless: the speaker wants what is good for the child, even when it costs the speaker. That makes the poem a useful contrast with poems in the cluster where love tries to hold on or possess.
The poem also suggests that letting go is not a single act but a process. The first day at school is the beginning; the speaker, looking back from eighteen years later, knows the many separations that followed. One small moment carries the weight of a whole parenthood.
Use this in an essay. Day-Lewis presents a parent's love as the willingness to let a child go: the speaker's final understanding that love is proved in letting go turns a painful memory into a lesson, though the poem admits the memory still gnaws at the speaker.
Growing up and independence
Separation as the beginning of a self.
For the child, walking away is the beginning of an independent life. Every image the speaker chooses — a satellite leaving orbit, a fledgling set free, a seed loosened from its stem — shows something leaving its source in order to exist on its own terms.
The poem also acknowledges the difficulty of growing up. The child is hesitant and pathless; the trials of childhood are small but scorching, like the fire that hardens clay. Independence is painful for the child as well as the parent.
Notice that the child's experience is imagined only from outside. We never learn whether the child was happy, frightened or excited. The poem is honest about this: it is the speaker's experience of the child's independence, and a reader can ask whether the child felt the parting as keenly as the parent did.
Memory (minor)
A moment that never fades.
The poem is a memory held for eighteen years with remarkable precision. The speaker can date it almost to the day and describe the weather and the pitch. Memory here is not fading but sharp, which shows how important the moment was.
The speaker's present perspective changes the memory's meaning. At the time it was a small event; looking back, the speaker sees it as the first of all partings.
Memory in the poem is also selective. The speaker keeps the weather, the pitch, the child's uncertain walk — and nothing of what happened next that day, nothing of the child's own feelings. What survives is what mattered to the speaker: the sight of the child leaving. The poem shows memory organising itself around a feeling.
Nature and God (minor)
Reaching for a larger meaning.
The speaker turns to nature's give and take — the way living things must separate to grow — and to the idea that only God could fully show the truth of the moment. The poem places a small family event inside a larger order of life.
This widening gives the speaker a kind of comfort. If separation is part of how all life works — seeds leaving plants, birds leaving nests — then the speaker's pain is not a private failure but part of a natural pattern. Yet the poem keeps the comfort modest: the speaker only suggests, and admits that the full truth is beyond the speaker's grasp.
Context
Context: the first separation
Starting school. For most families, a child's first going off to school is one of the first real separations between parent and child: the moment the child begins to have a life outside the home. Walking Away captures that moment from the parent's side, and its power comes from how ordinary and widely shared the experience is. The setting — a football game, a group of boys, a child heading off towards school — is everyday, and that ordinariness is the point.
Looking back. The poem is written from eighteen years later, when the child is grown. Looking back, the speaker knows that the first walking away was followed by many others. The poem's closing idea — that a self begins with a walking away and love is proved by letting go — reflects a widely held view of parenthood as giving a child life and then giving the child up. Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote it, was an Irish-born poet who became Poet Laureate late in his life; the poem itself names no one, and an essay should not supply names.
Use context in single clauses tied to moments: the child drifting away towards school with starting school as a first separation; the closing lesson with the eighteen years of separations that followed.
Form, voice and comparison
Form: five-line stanzas and a binding rhyme
The poem has four stanzas of five lines. The first, third and fifth lines of each stanza share a rhyme, so a single sound recurs through each stanza and binds it together, while the second and fourth lines vary. The effect is controlled and reflective, like a parent carefully going over a memory.
Lines often run on across line and stanza breaks, carrying the sense forward. The movement of the verse echoes the child's drifting away.
Structure: from memory to meaning
The first stanzas describe the memory: the day, the football, the child drifting off towards school. The third stanza begins to reflect, through the image of the winged seed and the speaker's struggle to explain. The final stanza admits the lasting pain and arrives at the lesson.
The structure mirrors the work of understanding: first seeing, then thinking, then concluding. It ends on a balanced, proverb-like statement that gives the poem its resolution.
Language: images of leaving
The poem's images come from three worlds: space (a satellite pulled from its orbit), birds (a half-feathered creature set free) and plants (a winged seed loosened from its stem). Each shows something leaving its source. Together they argue that separation is a natural part of life.
A fourth image comes from pottery: the small, scorching trials of childhood fire the soft, uncertain clay of a person and harden it. Pain becomes part of the making of a self.
Symbols: satellite, fledgling, seed, clay
The satellite suggests a child who has circled a parent and now drifts away into a vast, empty space. The fledgling suggests freedom before readiness. The seed suggests new life that must leave its parent to grow. The clay suggests a person shaped and hardened by small trials.
The symbols move from frightening (a satellite lost in space) to hopeful (a seed that will grow). That movement prepares for the poem's resolution.
Each symbol also involves a force that is outside human control: gravity releasing a satellite, instinct releasing a bird, the wind carrying a seed. The speaker cannot stop any of these, and the symbols suggest that the speaker cannot stop the child's growing up either. Letting go is not only a choice; it is a law of life the speaker must accept.
Key words and what they carry
orbit: The curved path of one body around another. The child had circled the parent.
half-fledged: A young bird whose feathers have not fully grown — not yet ready to fly.
eddying: Moving in small circles, like water in a stream. The child drifts uncertainly.
gnaws: Chews persistently. The memory troubles the speaker slowly and continually.
irresolute: Uncertain, not yet decided. The clay of a young person, not yet hardened.
Precise meanings help analysis: a half-fledged bird is set free too early; eddying movement is uncertain; a memory that gnaws is a pain that will not stop.
Comparison: the strongest partners
Mother, any distance (Armitage) is the natural partner: a parent and child at a moment of separation, told from the child's side rather than the parent's. Both poems use images of space and distance.
Follower (Heaney) shows a child who followed a parent and a parent who now follows the child; Eden Rock (Causley) shows parents calling a grown child back. Climbing My Grandfather offers a child's admiring closeness to an older relative.
Grade 9 insight. Compare methods: Day-Lewis's images of leaving; Armitage's tape measure and anchor and kite; Heaney's ploughing and reversal.
Readings to weigh
Another reading. A consolation reading: the lesson heals the speaker's pain.
Another reading. A wound reading: the lesson explains the pain but does not end it.
Another reading. A universal reading: one small moment stands for all of parenthood.
Shock the examiner: what most answers miss
Most answers say the speaker is sad the child is growing up. The poem is about why a small, ordinary parting hurts more than bigger ones: because it was the first, and stands for all the rest.
Every image of the child shows something leaving its source: a satellite, a fledgling, a seed. Taken together, they make an argument that separation is natural, even necessary, for life to go on.
The images move from frightening to hopeful. A satellite drifting in space is lost; a seed drifting from its stem will grow. The poem's imagery moves towards its own resolution.
The speaker admits the moment cannot quite be put into words. That is why the poem needs images — and why it ends with a short, proverb-like lesson rather than a description of feeling.
The lesson does not cancel the pain. The speaker still says the memory gnaws away, years later. The poem's honesty is in holding both: understanding and hurt at once.
Thesis statements
- Day-Lewis presents a parent's love as the willingness to let a child go, and shows how much that willingness costs.
- Walking Away turns a small, ordinary parting into a symbol of every separation between parent and child.
- The speaker's images of satellites, fledglings and seeds present the child's departure as natural and necessary as well as painful.
- The poem moves from memory to reflection, ending on a lesson that explains the speaker's pain without fully removing it.
- By remembering the moment eighteen years later, the speaker sees in the child's first walking away the shape of all that followed.
Essay plans
Compare the ways poets show the relationship between parents and children in Walking Away and one other poem from Love and Relationships.
Thesis: Both Day-Lewis and Armitage present a parent and child at a moment of separation, but Day-Lewis tells it from the parent who must let go, finding meaning in the release, while Armitage tells it from the child who is leaving, held for a moment at the other end of a tape.
- Point of view: the parent watching against the child moving away.
- Images of space and distance: satellites and orbits against kites and space-walking.
- Form: five-line stanzas binding the memory against a loose, sonnet-like shape.
- Endings: a lesson about letting go against an open choice to fall or fly. Conclude on release from both sides.
Compare the ways poets show memories of family members.
Thesis: Day-Lewis's speaker remembers a child walking away; Heaney's speaker remembers following a father — so the two poems show the bond between parent and child seen from opposite ends, and both end by reversing or releasing it.
- Who follows whom: a child drifting away against a child stumbling behind.
- Imagery: satellites and seeds against sails and furrows.
- Time: eighteen years later against childhood and today.
- Endings: letting go against a father who will not go away. Conclude on release and burden.
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Carry on
- The Complete Guide to Walking Away — the whole text, told properly, in 18 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.
- Walking Away · All set texts · The 4ET1 specification