A-Level English Literature: Victorian poetry - Rossetti, Hardy and Hopkins

Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy are among the pre-1900 poets most often set for A level English Literature, and Gerard Manley Hopkins is a frequent choice for comparison and wider reading. All three are long out of copyright, so this material prints their lines in full and asks you to read them as closely as an examiner would.

The Rossetti poems are 'Remember', 'Up-Hill', 'A Birthday' and the end of 'Goblin Market'. You look at how the Petrarchan sonnet's turn reverses a plea to be remembered, how a dialogue of questions and answers carries an allegory of life and death, how repeated similes build joy to a climax, and how the moral of 'Goblin Market' has been read in religious and in feminist terms.

The Hardy poems are 'Neutral Tones', 'The Darkling Thrush', 'The Voice' and 'The Convergence of the Twain'. They take you from the circular structure of a poem about love's deception, through a winter landscape seen as the corpse of the nineteenth century, to one of the elegies Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife in 1912, whose rhythm falters as its hope does, and to his poem on the Titanic, where human vanity meets an impersonal 'Immanent Will'.

The Hopkins poems are 'Pied Beauty' and 'Spring and Fall'. You meet his curtal sonnet and his sprung rhythm, and a child's grief for falling leaves that turns out to be grief for her own mortality.

Throughout, the questions ask what form, metre, sound and imagery contribute to meaning, rather than asking you to label devices. Context is kept to what explains the poems: Rossetti's Anglican faith, Hardy's agnosticism after the Victorian crisis of belief, Hopkins's Catholic priesthood.

The material offers a quiz of twelve questions with one defensible answer each and an explanation after every answer, twelve flashcards on forms, terms and key lines, and a printable written work of eight open questions, from close analysis of a printed poem to comparison and critical interpretation, each with a model answer and the key points a strong response should include.

• Analyse how Rossetti uses the sonnet, dialogue and repetition to shape meaning
• Explain how Hardy's rhythm, circular structure and imagery present loss, doubt and fate
• Describe Hopkins's curtal sonnet and sprung rhythm and their effects
• Compare the presentation of death and hope across poets
• Weigh religious and feminist readings of 'Goblin Market'
• Use Victorian religious contexts where they explain the poems

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE A level English Literature subject content (poetry, including poetry written before 1900). Quotations from public-domain texts: Rossetti, Poems (Gutenberg #19188); Hardy, Wessex Poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) and Satires of Circumstance (1914); Hopkins, Poems (1918).