A-Level English Literature: Poetry
Naming a device earns nothing. What earns marks is saying what the device is doing, and being right about where it is. So several of these questions are built on the distinction between a feature that is genuinely present and one a student has half-remembered: Blake repeats "charter'd" in the middle of two lines, which is not anaphora, because anaphora repeats at the start; the pause after "lies" in Ozymandias falls inside the line, which is what makes it a caesura rather than a line ending; the phrase "like a garment" in Wordsworth's sonnet is a simile, and what matters is that it dresses the city so the poem can go on treating it as a body.
Around those sit the questions that decide grades in the other direction. What the sound of "the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle" is actually doing, and why "orisons" is the word that tells you. What separates a Petrarchan sonnet from a Shakespearean one, and what a poet gains by breaking a pattern once it is established. What a Marxist reading and a psychoanalytic reading would each notice first in the same poem. And what distinguishes a contextual point that changes how a line reads from one that is only biography.
Every quotation here is from a poem published before 1930 and therefore out of copyright, attributed by poet and title, and no more than four lines. That is deliberate. Boards set different poets, most modern poetry is in copyright, and the reading method these questions train is the part that transfers — it works on whichever poems your specification happens to name.
Nothing is taken from any exam board specification, past paper, mark scheme or published critical work.
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- Identify a poetic device correctly, including where in the line it has to fall to count as that device
- Say what a device is doing in a particular line rather than simply naming it
- Distinguish a Petrarchan sonnet from a Shakespearean one by its structure
- Hear what the consonants and vowels of a line are doing, and connect the sound to the sense
- Say what a Marxist, psychoanalytic or other named critical approach would notice first in a poem
- Tell a contextual point that changes a reading apart from one that is only biography
William Blake's 'London' opens: 'I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow'. What does the repetition of 'charter'd' do here? — one of ten questions written for this set, alongside Keats, Wordsworth, Owen and Shelley, sonnet form, and Marxist and psychoanalytic reading.
Sample question
William Blake's 'London' opens: 'I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow'. What does the repetition of 'charter'd' do here?
- It is an anaphora, since the word opens both of the lines.
- It is a caesura, breaking each line at its midpoint.
- It is a controlling metaphor, comparing the whole city to a legal document.
- It carries a word belonging to property and trade across from the man-made street to the river, so that even the Thames is shown as something owned.
See the answer
It carries a word belonging to property and trade across from the man-made street to the river, so that even the Thames is shown as something owned.
A charter is a legal grant of rights, and applying it first to a street and then to a river takes ownership out to the one thing in the poem that ought to be beyond it. That is the whole point of the repetition. It is NOT anaphora, which repeats a word at the START of successive lines or clauses — 'charter'd' opens neither line, and this is the distinction the question is built on. A caesura is a pause inside a line rather than a repeated word, and one repeated adjective is not developed far enough to control the poem.