Love and Relationships
What's covered
Key facts
Before You Were Mine (Carol Ann Duffy)
In stanza 4 the speaker remembers her mother teaching her dance steps (the cha cha cha) on the way home from Mass.
Climbing My Grandfather (Andrew Waterhouse)
At the top of the climb the speaker, gasping for breath, lies still watching the clouds and birds, feeling his grandfather's heat and knowing the slow pulse of his heart; Oak says this final image is peaceful but could also symbolise death or the afterlife.
Comparing the poems
Oak says the heartbreak group (Winter Swans, Neutral Tones, When We Two Parted) initially use barren, inhospitable settings that reflect despairing emotions and show fragmented relationships (clearest in the rain-soaked walk of Winter Swans and the winter pond of Neutral Tones), but Sheers is the only poet to shift to a more hopeful tone when the couple are eventually unified.
Eden Rock (Charles Causley)
In the speaker's vision his parents are young: his father is twenty-five (line 2) and his mother twenty-three (line 5).
Follower (Seamus Heaney)
Oak says the speaker admires his father's skill and prowess, that detailed farming vocabulary (plough, furrow, headrig) shows his fascination, and that powerful verbs suggest the boy felt inadequate beside his father.
Letters from Yorkshire (Maura Dooley)
The poem ends at night, with the two watching the same news in different houses and their souls tapping out messages across the icy miles between them.
Love's Philosophy (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
The poem has two stanzas of eight lines (sixteen lines in all), each rhyming ABABCDCD.
Mother, any distance (Simon Armitage)
The poem's final line, "to fall or fly", leaves the speaker's future open.
Neutral Tones (Thomas Hardy)
The sun is described as white "as though chidden of God"; Oak explains that chidden means scolded or reprimanded, so the landscape feels harsh and desolate.
Porphyria's Lover (Robert Browning)
After the murder he props her head on his shoulder, marvelling that he can keep her like a doll; they sit together all night, and the last line says "And yet God has not said a word!"
Practice questions with answers
A taste of the 111 questions in this topic, answers marked. Sign up to practise the full set with spaced repetition.
What does the speaker of Before You Were Mine imagine?
- •Her father's early days as a soldier
- •Her grandmother's childhood in the city
- ✓Her mother's life before she was born
- •Her own wedding day many years ago
What does the speaker climb in Climbing My Grandfather?
- •A hill behind the family farm
- •A ladder in his grandfather's house
- •A real mountain with his grandfather
- ✓The old man's body, as if it were a mountain
In Paper 2 Section B, what do students compare?
- •A named poem and a prose extract
- ✓A printed named poem and one other from their cluster
- •Any two poems from the whole anthology
- •Two unseen poems from different clusters
What are the speaker's parents doing in Eden Rock?
- ✓Having a picnic on the far bank of a stream
- •Waiting at a station for a train
- •Walking home across the moors
- •Working in a garden by the house
What is the father doing in Follower?
- •Building a wall around the farm
- •Digging a ditch beside the road
- ✓Ploughing a field with a team of horses
- •Selling cattle at a local market
What was the man in Letters from Yorkshire doing when he saw the first lapwings return?
- ✓Digging his garden and planting potatoes
- •Feeding lambs on a hillside farm
- •Mending the roof of his cottage
- •Walking his dog across the moors
Three minutes a day. Knowledge that sticks.
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