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The prescribed poems of the Pearson Edexcel IGCSE Literature (4ET1) Anthology - full line-by-line study guides for the public-domain poems and concise notes for the rest.
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Anthology version: This site teaches Issue 8 (February 2026) of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology (ISBN 978-1-446-93108-0). Material differences from freely-available online versions include:
Anthology © Pearson Education Limited 2026 - quotations on individual set-text pages are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA s.30. Pearson publishes the full anthology free as a PDF on its qualifications website.
Part 3 of the anthology spans four centuries, from Shakespeare and Blake to Duffy and Agard. You must know every Part 3 poem: Section B can name any of them, in either of its two questions.
Paper 1 Section B - Anthology Poetry (30 marks, about 40 minutes). You answer one of two questions, and both compare two Part 3 poems: one names both, and the other names one and lets you choose the second. Both ask about language, form and structure.
Comparison. Every paragraph should weave both poems together rather than treating them separately. Know at least two strong pairings for every major theme.
Rudyard Kipling
A father addresses his son, listing the qualities required to live a balanced, honourable life and become a person of integrity.
Louis MacNeice
A child not yet born asks an unnamed listener to shield it from the cruelty of the adult world.
Imtiaz Dharker
Where water is always scarce, a burst municipal pipe brings a whole community running to catch it.
Sujata Bhatt
The speaker imagines losing her mother tongue while living in a foreign one, then finds it growing back in her dreams.
U A Fanthorpe
Kept in as a punishment, a small boy who cannot tell the time drifts out of clock time until his teacher returns.
D H Lawrence
A woman singing at dusk carries the adult speaker back to sitting under the piano as his mother played, and he weeps for the past.
Vernon Scannell
A child hides so well in a garden toolshed that the game turns into a lesson in being forgotten.
William Shakespeare
A meditation on true love as a fixed and enduring force that cannot be altered by time, circumstance or trouble.
John Keats
A pale, wandering knight tells how a mysterious fairy woman enchanted him and left him alone on a cold hillside.
Alice Walker
Writing at thirty-nine, after her father’s death, the speaker remembers what he taught her and how much of him lives on in her.
Carol Ann Duffy
A war photographer develops pictures at home in England, caught between the horrors abroad and readers' short-lived sympathy.
William Blake
The speaker asks what kind of creator could have made the terrifying, beautiful tiger - and the lamb too.
Robert Browning
The Duke of Ferrara shows an envoy the portrait of his late wife and, as he talks, reveals the jealousy and need for control behind her death.
John Agard
The speaker challenges the term ‘half-caste’ by mocking its illogic, drawing on art, music and weather to expose its absurdity.
Dylan Thomas
A son begs his dying father to fight against death rather than go quietly.
Christina Rossetti
A speaker asks her beloved to remember her after death - then, selflessly, prefers he forget and be happy.
Section B gives you a choice of two questions. One names both poems; the other names one and leaves the second to you, from Part 3, and then your job is to pick a poem that lets you say something sharp about the question’s focus. Pearson has set every pairing below as the two-poem question, so each is good practice for either:
A sensible order for working through the anthology from your first read to exam-ready.
Read all of the prescribed poems aloud twice. Don't analyse yet - just mark the lines that strike you and note your first reaction to each poem.
Work through each poem in turn using the line-by-line interactive viewer. Memorise at least three short quotes per poem and note the key language devices.
Group the poems by theme (love, power, childhood, identity, death). For every theme, know two pairings well enough to write about under timed conditions.
Write timed responses to past-paper questions, about 40 minutes each. Keep both poems in every paragraph, and when the second poem is yours to choose, pick one that gives you a clear angle on the question.