Key Quotes for Every AQA Love and Relationships Poem

The AQA Love and Relationships cluster sits in Section B of AQA Paper 2 (8702/2). Candidates answer one comparison question on one named poem, printed on the paper, and one other poem of their choice from the cluster, which they have studied. The comparison is worth 30 marks.

The cluster runs from Byron and Shelley in the early nineteenth century to Owen Sheers and Daljit Nagra in the twenty-first: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 29, Robert Browning's dramatic monologue Porphyria's Lover, Duffy's Before You Were Mine, Armitage's Mother, any distance. Students find the range of form and period challenging - sonnet vs dramatic monologue vs free verse - but this variety is also what makes the cluster examinable in depth.

Strong Love and Relationships essays treat the poems as a conversation across time about what love means. Weak essays treat them as fifteen unrelated set texts. The single best move for most students is to map out 4-5 "thematic pairings" (e.g. grief of losing a parent: Walking Away + Mother Any Distance) that they can deploy regardless of which poem is named on the paper.

"my thoughts do twine and bud / About thee, as wild vines, about a tree"

Sonnet 29, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Extended metaphor + simile. The speaker's thoughts grow over the beloved like vines over a tree until "nought" of him can be seen - and the sonnet then turns to want the man himself, not her thoughts of him.

"In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around"

Porphyria's Lover, Robert Browning

Dramatic monologue + steady rhythm and rhyme. The speaker narrates the killing in the same even metre as the love scene before it, and his "No pain felt she" shows how completely he has made her an object to keep.

"I can see / You walking away from me towards the school"

Walking Away, C. Day-Lewis

Present tense + direct address. Day-Lewis collapses the eighteen-year gap between the moment and the writing, making memory feel immediate. The line break enacts the separation it describes.

"In silence I grieve, / That thy heart could forget"

When We Two Parted, Lord Byron

Short lines + rhyme. The affair was conducted "In secret", so the speaker must grieve in silence too, and the rhyme of "met" with "forget" ties the secret meeting to the betrayal.

"my bride / she effing at my mum"

Singh Song!, Daljit Nagra

Code-switching + Punjabi-English vernacular. Nagra dramatises a mixed-heritage marriage in the very texture of the language - comic, affectionate, irreverent.

"She sleeps up in the attic there / Alone, poor maid."

The Farmer's Bride, Charlotte Mew

Spatial separation + tonal slip. The farmer's pity ("poor maid") sits uncomfortably with his role in her isolation; Mew lets the dramatic monologue indict its own speaker.