AQA Paper 2 Section B is the poetry anthology comparison question. Your school studies one of two clusters: Power and Conflict or Love and Relationships. Q26 names one poem from your cluster and asks you to compare it with a poem of your choice.
The two clusters (15 poems each)
Power and Conflict: Ozymandias (Shelley), London (Blake), The Prelude — extract (Wordsworth), My Last Duchess (Browning), The Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson), Exposure (Owen), Storm on the Island (Heaney), Bayonet Charge (Hughes), Remains (Armitage), Poppies (Weir), War Photographer (Duffy), Tissue (Dharker), The Emigree (Rumens), Checking Out Me History (Agard), Kamikaze (Garland).
Love and Relationships: When We Two Parted (Byron), Love's Philosophy (Shelley), Porphyria's Lover (Browning), Sonnet 29 (E. B. Browning), Neutral Tones (Hardy), The Farmer's Bride (Mew), Walking Away (Day Lewis), Letters from Yorkshire (Dooley), Eden Rock (Causley), Follower (Heaney), Before You Were Mine (Duffy), Winter Swans (Sheers), Singh Song! (Nagra), Climbing My Grandfather (Waterhouse).
Key differences between the clusters
Power and Conflict explores power in political, military, and individual senses — the hubris of rulers (Ozymandias, My Last Duchess), the reality of war (Owen, Hughes, Armitage, Weir), the power of nature (Wordsworth, Heaney), and the power of identity and memory (Agard, Rumens, Dharker).
Love and Relationships explores the many forms love takes — romantic (Browning, Shelley), obsessive (Browning, Mew), familial/parental (Day Lewis, Heaney, Causley, Duffy), and the ending of love (Hardy, Byron).
Q26 mark scheme
- AO1 = 15 marks: comparison of ideas and attitudes; sustained, developing comparison argument.
- AO2 = 15 marks: analysis of methods (language, form, structure) in both poems; subject terminology.
- AO3 = 0 marks: no context marks — do not waste time.
- AO4 = 0 marks: no writing quality marks here.
- Total: 30 marks. ~35 minutes.
Choosing the second poem: quick guide
For Power and Conflict pairings:
- Ozymandias + My Last Duchess (both rulers; both use irony to undermine the ruler's self-perception)
- Exposure + Bayonet Charge (both war poems; one static suffering, one dynamic terror)
- London + The Emigree (both urban; both about the experience of alienation or oppression)
- Remains + War Photographer (both explore psychological aftermath of conflict)
- Poppies + Kamikaze (both from women's perspective on male military sacrifice)
For Love and Relationships pairings:
- Porphyria's Lover + The Farmer's Bride (both obsessive; both dramatic monologue)
- Neutral Tones + When We Two Parted (both lost love; different emotional textures)
- Walking Away + Before You Were Mine (both parental love; different perspectives)
- Winter Swans + Letters from Yorkshire (both about maintaining love under difficulty)
The comparison strategy
- Open with a comparative thesis — not two separate introductions.
- Alternate between poems throughout.
- Compare methods, not just themes: "While Owen uses present-tense continuous ('Our brains ache') to enact the ongoing suffering, Hughes uses the preterite ('He lay still') to show the abrupt cessation of consciousness."
- End with the fundamental difference or similarity your argument has established.
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