Triage: five minutes that decide the grade

Before you write a word, annotate both poems against the same checklist. Do Poem A completely, then Poem B — comparing as you go is how candidates lose the thread.

1. Who is speaking, to whom? Is the beloved addressed (you), described (she), or absent? An addressed beloved who never replies is a fact worth an entire paragraph.
2. What kind of love is this? Desire, devotion, grief, disillusion, marriage, betrayal, familial love, love remembered? Do not assume romance.
3. Where in the tradition does it stand? Does it use the inherited vocabulary — the blazon, the flame, the shrine, the conceit — or refuse it? Refusal is a position too.
4. Form. Sonnet? Regular stanzas? Free verse? Rhymed? Where is the turn?
5. What is the poem's attitude to its own feeling? Sincere, ironic, self-mocking, self-deceiving? The gap between what a speaker says and what a poem knows is where the best paragraphs come from.

The single most useful annotation: mark the turn in each poem — the line where the tone, tense, addressee or confidence changes. Almost every poem has one, and the comparison of the two turns is very often the essay.

Triage priorities

The comparative thesis

Do not open by describing the poems. Open with a comparative claim — one sentence that both poems will be used to prove.

Weak: Both poems are about love. I will compare their language, structure and form.

Strong: Both poems address a beloved who never answers — but where the first treats that silence as proof of perfection, the second treats it as evidence of something the speaker would rather not examine, and the two poems therefore end up in opposite relations to the tradition they share.

Structure the essay by IDEA, not by poem. Four or five paragraphs, each on a shared aspect (the addressee; the treatment of time; the imagery of the body; the ending), each handling both poems. A five-paragraph block on Poem A followed by a block on Poem B is the commonest structural mistake in this question, and it caps AO4.

Essay structure

Sort the poetic observation

Tap an observation, then tap which analytical category it belongs to.

What to analyse: a checklist that never runs dry

Voice and address — first or third person; dramatic monologue; the addressee's silence; direct imperatives; who is permitted to speak.

Form and structure — the shape on the page; stanza length and regularity (and where it breaks); rhyme scheme (and where it fails); the volta; enjambment running feeling past the line-end; caesura stopping it dead; the final line, which is the most loaded position in any poem.

Metre — iambic regularity as composure; substitution and reversal as disturbance. Do not scan the whole poem; scan the one line that does not behave.

Imagery and diction — semantic fields (light, fire, war, illness, religion, money, food, nature); the register (Latinate and elevated vs Anglo-Saxon and plain); euphemism; what the poem refuses to name.

Tone — and, crucially, tonal shift. Where does the poem stop meaning it?

Every observation must complete the chain: method → effect → what it says about love. Stop at the second step and you have written a language exercise. The third step is the question you were actually asked.

Completing the chain

Match the poetic method to its effect

Tap a method on the left, then the effect it produces.

Comparison: the skill the question is really testing

AO4 is heavily weighted in Section B. It is not similarity-spotting. Comparison is an argument in which each poem makes the other visible.

Four comparative moves that always work:

• Same aspect, opposite handling. Both address an absent beloved — but one experiences the absence as an occasion for devotion and the other as an occasion for relief.
• Same convention, different attitude. One poem inhabits the blazon; the other dismantles it. The second is only legible because the first exists.
• Different eras, same problem. Four hundred years apart, both poems are trying to work out whether love survives being spoken aloud.
• The connective tissue. Use precise comparative discourse markers — whereas, by contrast, in a manoeuvre the earlier poem could not have permitted itself. Vague ones (similarly, also) signal weak comparison.

If the poems are from different periods, the comparison is partly a comparison of what love was allowed to be — and there is your AO3, earned without a single date.

AO4 quality

Inferring context safely from an unseen poem

The poems are usually attributed with a name and sometimes a date — but often you will not know the poet, and you must never invent.

• Infer from the language. Archaic diction, thee and thou, a strict sonnet form, a female beloved who does not speak: these are evidence about the world the poem assumes.
• Infer from the assumptions. A poem that treats marriage as the natural end of desire, or chastity as the beloved's chief virtue, is telling you what its readers took for granted.
• Hedge honestly. The poem appears to address a readership for whom X is unremarkable is a legitimate and creditable sentence. This poem was written in 1633 by John Donne, when you are not sure, is not.
• Reception is always available. You may always ask how the poem lands on a modern reader, and how differently it may have landed on its first.

Never manufacture biography. Examiners cannot credit a claim they know to be false, and a fabricated fact makes them doubt every real one you have made.

Safe context

Alternative readings under time pressure

AO5 in the unseen does not require critics by name. It requires you to show a poem can be read more than one way, and to adjudicate.

• The lens sentence, deployed once or twice where it genuinely bites: A feminist reading would note that the poem's adoration and its refusal to grant her a single line of speech are not in tension but in partnership.
• The counter-reading: The poem can be read as an unguarded expression of grief — but its metre never once falters, and a grief that can keep to iambic pentameter for forty lines is a grief that has been composed.
• The word ALTHOUGH. An argument that can turn on itself and survive is what separates a good answer from an excellent one.

Beware the single most common misreading: assuming that the speaker is the poet, and that the poem endorses what the speaker says. A dramatic monologue can present a lover whose language the poem itself is inviting you to distrust.

Speaker and poet

The clock, and what to do when it beats you

Section B is one of three 25-mark sections. It should take roughly one third of the paper — no more, however frightening it is.

A workable split within the hour:

• ~10 minutes: read both poems twice, annotate against the checklist, mark both turns, fix the comparative thesis.
• ~5 minutes: plan four idea-paragraphs, each handling both poems, each with a named difference.
• ~40 minutes: write. Thesis first sentence. Every paragraph completes the chain to love.
• ~5 minutes: check expression. AO1 credits accuracy, and it is the cheapest mark on the paper to lose.

If you run out of time: abandon a paragraph, not the conclusion. Return to the thesis, state what the two poems together reveal about how love has been written, and stop. An argument that lands beats an analysis that stops mid-sentence.

Under pressure

The big ideas to take into the exam

The unseen is the most revisable question on the paper, because what you are revising is a procedure. Press Finish to see your score.