GCSE English Literature: Love and Relationships Poems Before 1920

Anthology clusters about love and relationships mix modern poems with older ones that are out of copyright. This material concentrates on five of those older poems, so that every line discussed can be quoted accurately: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 29 ('I think of thee!', published 1850), Thomas Hardy's 'Neutral Tones' (written 1867), Robert Browning's 'Porphyria's Lover', Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Love's Philosophy' (1819) and Charlotte Mew's 'The Farmer's Bride' (1916). In AQA's Love and Relationships cluster, for example, all five are set alongside modern poems.

The questions deal first with situation and voice: a woman whose thoughts of her lover have grown like vines until they hide him; a man remembering the grey winter day when love died; a speaker who strangles the woman who has come to him through a storm; a lover arguing from nature that his beloved should kiss him; and a farmer whose young wife is terrified of him. You then study how form carries meaning — the Petrarchan sonnet with its reversal from 'I think of thee' to 'I do not think of thee', Hardy's cyclical quatrains, the dramatic monologue and the unreliable speaker, persuasive rhetorical questions, and the broken syntax at the end of Mew's poem — and the key images: the vines and the palm-tree, the 'white' sun and 'gray' leaves, the stormy pathetic fallacy, and the animal comparisons that show how the farmer sees his wife.

Context is added where it helps interpretation: the courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Victorian ideas of possession and propriety, and the rural world and marriage expectations behind Mew's poem. The final questions practise comparison, especially the pairing of two dramatic monologues about power and possession in relationships, and the contrast between joyful and disappointed love.

The quiz asks one-answer questions on interpretation and method and quotes every line it asks about. The flashcards cover forms, key quotations and terms such as paradox, pathetic fallacy and dramatic monologue. The printable written work provides eight open questions with model answers and key points, from analysing a single image to planning a comparison, so that you can rehearse writing from memory for the closed-book exam.

• Explain the situation and speaker of each of the five poems
• Analyse extended metaphor, paradox, pathetic fallacy and animal imagery
• Comment on the Petrarchan sonnet, cyclical structure and the dramatic monologue
• Recognise an unreliable or disturbing speaker and explain how the poet reveals him
• Plan comparisons of love, loss, desire and control across the poems

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE GCSE English Literature subject content (poetry since 1789) and the poems as set in exam-board anthologies (for example the AQA Love and Relationships cluster). Quotations are from public-domain texts: E. Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese XXIX (1850); Hardy, 'Neutral Tones', Wessex Poems (1898); R. Browning, 'Porphyria's Lover'; Shelley, 'Love's Philosophy' (1819); Mew, 'The Farmer's Bride' (1916).