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PoetryEdexcel IGCSE AnthologyChildhood

Hide and Seek: Revision Notes

Vernon Scannell (1922-2007)

A complete International GCSE guide to Scannell's unsettling poem about a children's game that turns into abandonment: the second-person voice, the single block of present-tense verse, themes of isolation and betrayal, key quotations with analysis, context and exam tips.

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Overview Form & Structure Voice & Speaker Themes Key Quotations Language & Imagery Context Comparisons

Hide and Seek drops us into the middle of a children's game. A child finds a brilliant hiding place among the sacks of a garden toolshed, calls out the ritual challenge, announcing that he is ready and daring the others to find him, and settles down to outlast the seekers. We follow his tactics in real time: keep still, don't sneeze, ignore the cold, wait them out even when their whispers fade. At last, certain of victory, he bursts from his hiding place to claim his triumph, and finds the garden growing dark, silent and empty. The seekers stopped seeking long ago. The poem ends on his unanswered question about where everyone has gone.

On the surface this is a perfectly observed slice of childhood. Underneath, it is a small parable: the hider wins the game and loses everything that made the game worth playing. Skill, patience and cleverness are rewarded with solitude. Many readers take the game as a metaphor for experiences that come later in life: the discovery that the world has moved on without you, that triumph can be indistinguishable from abandonment, that hiding too well is a way of being forgotten. Scannell keeps every detail literal and childlike, which is exactly why the ending lands so hard.

At a Glance

• A single continuous block of verse, no stanza breaks
• Present tense throughout: the game unfolds in real time
• Second-person address (“you”) with imperative commands
• Irregular, intermittent rhyme beneath a conversational surface
• Core idea: a child's game becomes a lesson in abandonment
• The child is never named or called a boy or a girl: the poem only says “you”. These notes use he for ease of reading
• In Part 3 of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology: set for English Literature (4ET1) only, not English Language A

Exam Tips for Hide and Seek

Lead with voice and tense. Second-person imperatives plus real-time present tense are the poem's defining methods; explain how they create immersion, suspense and universality before discussing individual images.
Track one image across the poem. The seaside smell of the sacks, from holiday pleasure to throat-catching damp, demonstrates development rather than technique-spotting, which is what top bands require.
Argue an interpretation of the ending. Casual forgetfulness, deliberate desertion, or a parable about self-concealment: commit to a reading, support it, and acknowledge the poem's deliberate ambiguity.
One sentence of Scannell is enough, if any. The anthology poetry question rewards analysis and comparison, not context. Soldier, deserter, boxer, unsentimental poet of childhood fear; connect it to the poem's refusal of comfort, not to biographical speculation.
Use the structural turn. Whatever the question, the pivot from triumphant emergence to empty garden is the poem's key moment; quote the watching garden and the final question, and analyse the silence they create.

See it unfold

The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.

Tension arc

How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.

Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.

Key moments

Moment 1 of 7 · Lines 1-5

The call and the hiding place

A garden toolshed, among sacks

Hidden among sacks in a garden toolshed that smell of the seaside, the child shouts that they are ready to be found. The voice is sure no one will find this spot, but warns the child to keep their feet out of sight and not to call again.

“find me”

Who

The hider
The voice

Why it matters

The poem opens with a request to be found and ends with no one looking, so everything that follows is measured against this first wish.

Pride Before a FallAppearance of a Game, Reality of a Test

Lines 1-5: The call and the hiding place. Hidden among sacks in a garden toolshed that smell of the seaside, the child shouts that they are ready to be found. The voice is sure no one will find this spot, but warns the child to keep their feet out of sight and not to call again. "find me" The poem opens with a request to be found and ends with no one looking, so everything that follows is measured against this first wish.
Lines 6-10: The seekers arrive. On the cold floor the voice guesses where the seekers are searching and warns against sneezing. Then they reach the shed door, whispering, quieter than the child has ever heard them. "whispering at the door" The seekers are within earshot and about to come closer still, yet they are only ever heard; within three lines they are gone, and from then on they exist only in the voice’s guesses.
Lines 11-13: Stillness, and a departure. The voice orders total stillness and silence in four short sentences. The seekers move closer, someone stumbles and mutters, and their words and laughter blur together as they leave. "Hide in your blindness" The seekers leave while the child is working hardest not to be found, so the shared game may already be over at the moment it seems to be going best.
Lines 14-17: The voice’s guesses. The voice tells the child to stay hidden, predicting that the seekers will search the lane and the greenhouse and then come back, and imagines them puzzled by how clever the hider has been. "must be thinking" Every statement about the seekers here is a guess and none is ever confirmed: the child’s confidence rests on thoughts it imagines in other people.
Lines 18-20: The long wait. Time passes. The voice notes how long the seekers have been gone without drawing the obvious conclusion. The child’s legs stiffen, the cold gets through the coat and the damp smell of sand gets into the throat. The body registers what the mind will not: the verb in line 18 is the first simple past in the poem, and it says the seekers left.
Lines 21-24: Coming out to claim the win. Sure of victory, the child pushes off the sacks, stretches and walks out of the shed, calling that they have won and demanding that the seekers admit they have been caught. "you’re the winner" The verdict of winner is reached in the dark shed, on no evidence from outside, and the hider even claims the seeker’s word, caught, so the roles of the game are reversed at the moment of triumph.
Lines 25-27: The empty garden. No one answers. The garden is darkening and still, the bushes do not move and the sun has set. The voice confirms that the child is there, and asks where the seekers have gone. "they who sought you" The poem’s only question closes it, and its past-tense verb confirms that the seeking is over, and suggests it ended some time before the child knew.

Character map

Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.

The voice · instructor and player, perhaps one mind · The hider
The voice gives every order the hider follows, from the first call to the last. It may be the child’s own inner voice, as Pearson’s guide reads it, or a separate, knowing one. Either way its confidence drives the child on, and its last words confirm, too late, that the child is alone.
The hider · playmates, then absentees · The seekers
The game needs both sides to keep playing, and only one does. The seekers are heard but never seen: whispering, stumbling, laughing, then nothing. The child asks to be found in line 1 and claims to have caught them in line 24, and they answer neither.
The voice · guesser and guessed · The seekers
The voice keeps predicting what the seekers are doing and thinking (lines 6 to 7 and 14 to 17), and none of its guesses is confirmed. In line 18 it notes, without seeing what it means, how long they have been away.

Study guide sections

The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.

Key passages for close reading

The call and the hiding place

Lines 1-8

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 1 to 8: from the opening call to the end of line 8, where the voice warns against sneezing when the seekers come in.

Already hidden among sacks in a garden toolshed that smell of the seaside, the child shouts that they are ready to be found. The voice is certain nobody will find this place, then turns cautious: keep your feet out of sight, and do not risk calling out again. It notes that the floor is cold, guesses where the seekers are looking and warns that a sneeze would give the hider away.

1“find me” The first thing the child asks for is to be found. In the game it is a dare, since a good hider wants the seekers to fail; in the poem it becomes a request that nobody answers. Keep it in mind at line 27, where no one is still looking.
2“salty dark” The adjective belongs to taste and smell, the noun to sight, so two senses fuse in one phrase. Carried over from the seaside simile of line 2, it makes the dark cosy and faintly holiday-like. A related smell, of damp sand, returns in line 20, this time moving in the throat, so the pleasant sensation can be read as turning oppressive.
3“prowling” The voice pictures the seekers as animals on the hunt, which makes the hider their prey. That is the thrill of the game: being hunted is exciting for as long as the hunt goes on. The irony is prepared here, because these prowlers will leave without their catch.

The question: Close-reading practice, not an exam question (in the exam this poem is always compared with another Part 3 poem). How does Scannell use language and structure in lines 1 to 8 to present the child’s excitement and confidence at the start of the game?

The seekers at the door

Lines 9-17

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 9 to 17: from the seekers’ arrival at the shed door to the voice imagining them growing more puzzled as they search.

The seekers reach the door of the shed, quieter than the child has ever heard them. The voice orders complete stillness and silence. The seekers move closer, someone stumbles and mutters, and then their words and laughter blur together and they are gone. The voice tells the child to stay put, predicting that the seekers will try other places and come back, and imagining them baffled by such a clever hider.

1“whispering at the door” The seekers have arrived, and in line 12 they come closer still, but they are heard and never seen: every sign of them in lines 9 to 13 is a sound reaching a hider in the dark. The whisper can be read as the excitement of a hunt that is nearly over, or as the seekers conferring about whether to carry on.
2“Hide in your blindness” Line 11 packs four sentences into one line, and the full stops fall like held breaths. The last order is the strangest. In the shed the child really cannot see, but the phrase also names what the ending exposes: the hider has no idea what is happening outside, and makes that not-knowing into a hiding place.
3“scuffle” The seekers leave as one blurred sound. Scuffle can mean a brief tussle or a shuffling walk, and both senses fit, as words and laughter jostle and feet move off. The laughter is never explained. The same line ends with the word gone, which returns in line 26 for the sun.
4“must be thinking” A modal verb of deduction turns a guess into a certainty. With probably in line 6 and the predictions of lines 14 to 15, it shows how much of the middle of the poem is the voice imagining other people’s minds. None of these guesses is ever confirmed, and the ending suggests they were all wrong.

The question: Close-reading practice, not an exam question (in the exam this poem is always compared with another Part 3 poem). Explore how Scannell presents the seekers in lines 9 to 17, even though the child never sees them.

Coming out

Lines 21-27

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 21 to 27: from the decision that it is time to claim the win to the question that ends the poem.

Sure of victory, the child throws off the sacks, stretches and walks out of the shed, shouting that they have won and telling the seekers to admit they have been caught. Nobody answers. The garden is growing dark and completely still, and the sun has set. The last line confirms that the child is there, then asks where the seekers have gone.

1“you’re the winner” The verdict comes from inside the shed, not from any sign outside: nothing in lines 18 to 20 suggests the seekers are near. Cold, stiffness and a long silence have been read as proof of skill rather than as warnings. A reader who noticed in line 18 that the seekers went away hears the dramatic irony the child cannot.
2“caught you” The hider uses the seeker’s word. Catching is what seekers do, so at the moment of triumph the child claims both roles and demands that the others own up to losing. The phrase also rhymes with the last two words of the poem, three lines later, so the boast and the question are bound together by sound.
3“The darkening garden watches” After the exclamations of lines 22 to 24 comes a short statement and a full stop in mid-line. The present participle darkening shows that time is still running on. The attention the child wanted from the seekers is given only by the garden, and a watcher that says nothing is cold company.
4“hold their breath” The bushes do what the child was told to do in line 11. The tactic the child trusted to win the game has passed to the setting, as though the garden were now hiding from the child, and the hider has become a seeker with nothing left to find.
5“they who sought you” The verb of the title returns in the past tense: the seeking is over. The phrasing is stiff and old-fashioned after lines full of chatty contractions, which lifts the question out of the game. It is the only question mark in the poem, and no one answers it.

The question: Close-reading practice, not an exam question (in the exam this poem is always compared with another Part 3 poem). How does Scannell use language, form and structure in lines 21 to 27 to present the change from triumph to isolation?

Key vocabulary

Toolshed: An outdoor shed for keeping garden tools and equipment. It is the hiding place, somewhere in the garden and out of sight: a small, dark, adult space the child has borrowed for a game, and the place the poem is spoken from until the child walks out in line 23.
Sack: A large bag of strong, coarse cloth used to store things such as potatoes or coal. The child hides under the sacks, which is why the voice says to push them off in line 22. They smell of the seaside (line 2), and the damp smell of sand in line 20 may well come from them too.
Prowling (line 8): Moving about quietly and secretly, as an animal does when it hunts. The word casts the seekers as hunters and the hider as their prey.
Hushed (line 10): Very quiet, spoken in soft, lowered voices. The seekers have never sounded so quiet before: the hush makes the moment tense, and it can be read as the first sign that their behaviour is changing.
Dumb (line 11): Here it means silent, an older sense of the word, not stupid. The order to stay silent is the third of four short commands packed into one line.
Mutter (line 12): To speak quietly and unclearly, under one’s breath, often in complaint. It is one of several sounds that stand in for the seekers, who are never seen.
Scuffle (line 13): As a verb, to struggle confusedly at close quarters, or to walk with a shuffling step. Both senses fit the blurred sound of the seekers moving away.
Own up (line 24): To admit or confess something, especially a fault. The child demands that the seekers confess they have lost; the irony is that what they might really have to admit is leaving.
Sought (line 27): The past tense of seek, the second half of the game’s name. The title is completed only in the poem’s last line, in the past tense, when the seeking has already stopped.
Imperative: A verb in the form of a command: call, push, stretch, do not move. Much of the poem is instructions, and the command form keeps the child, and the reader, under orders until the child steps out of the shed.
Second-person address: Writing that speaks to you. The poem never says I except inside the child’s spoken calls (lines 1 and 23 to 24), so the reader is placed in the hiding place beside the child, or as the child.
Modal verb: A verb such as must, will, might or should that shows how certain, likely or necessary something is. In line 16, must is used to deduce what the seekers are thinking, a certainty the voice has no evidence for.
Caesura: A pause in the middle of a line, usually marked by punctuation. Line 11 has three, and lines 22, 25 and 27 each break at a full stop, so the most intense moments of the poem are also its most broken.
Enjambment: When a sentence runs on from one line into the next without a pause. Lines 6 to 8 run on twice as the voice’s thoughts hurry from the cold floor to the swing to the danger of a sneeze.
Rhyming couplet: Two lines in a row that rhyme. The poem has four full ones, ending on lines 5, 10, 15 and 20, so a regular pattern runs under its conversational surface until the child decides to come out.
Half-rhyme: A near rhyme, in which the sounds are similar but not the same, such as clever and over (lines 16 to 17) or winner and better (lines 21 to 22). They sit beside the full rhymes as a looser echo.
Dramatic irony: When the reader understands something a character does not. From line 13 onward the reader suspects the seekers have gone for good, while the child reads every sign as success.
Synaesthesia: Describing one sense in terms of another, as in the salty dark of line 3, where darkness is given a taste.
Register: The level of formality in language. The poem is almost all everyday speech, full of contractions, until the stiff, old-fashioned phrasing of its final question.

Exam practice

Comparative essay with a second Part 3 poem of your own choice: language, form and structure

Compare how the writers present personal experiences in Hide and Seek and one other poem from the anthology. You should make reference to language, form and structure. Support your answer with examples from the poems.

How to answer it

Choose a partner poem that lets you compare methods, not just subjects. Half-past Two (a child left alone in a classroom), Piano (an adult overwhelmed by a childhood memory) and La Belle Dame sans Merci (a knight left alone on a cold hillside) all give real contrasts.
Open with a thesis that compares. For example: both poems present an experience from the inside, but Scannell keeps the reader in the moment, in the present tense and the second person, and gives no later perspective from which it can be understood.
Compare voice. Weigh two readings of Scannell’s you, the child’s own inner voice (the reading in Pearson’s Getting Started Guide) or a separate, knowing voice, and set it against the voice of your partner poem.
Compare structure. Scannell’s single block of 27 lines, with rhyming couplets closing lines 5, 10, 15 and 20 and the pattern breaking as the child comes out, against the stanzas and rhyme of your second poem.
Compare endings. Line 27 is the poem’s only question, and no one answers it. Put it beside how your partner poem closes, and decide which leaves its speaker or subject worse off.
Keep every paragraph comparative, with connectives that carry an argument (whereas, while, by contrast), and end with a judgement about what each poet suggests an experience like this does to a person.

Comparative essay on two named anthology poems

Compare how the writers use instructions and advice in If- and Hide and Seek. You should make reference to language, form and structure. Support your answer with examples from the poems.

How to answer it

Start with address. Both poems speak to a you in the present tense: Kipling’s speaker to a young man addressed as his son only in the last line, through conditional clauses beginning If; Scannell’s voice to a hiding child, through imperatives.
Compare the grammar of instruction. Kipling builds one long sentence, as Pearson’s own mark scheme notes, that delays its reward to the end; Scannell uses clipped commands, four of them in line 11 alone.
Use waiting as a bridge. Line 5 of If- praises waiting without tiring of it. Scannell’s child does exactly that, holding out through cold and stiffness in lines 18 to 20, and loses.
Compare what obedience earns. Kipling promises the earth and manhood in his last two lines; Scannell’s child follows every instruction perfectly and is rewarded with a dark, empty garden.
Consider who gives the orders. Kipling’s speaker is a father with experience; Scannell’s voice may be the child’s own and cannot see outside the shed, so its advice is only as good as its guesses (lines 6 to 7 and 14 to 17).
Conclude on attitude: one poem trusts that keeping to the rules leads to success, while the other suggests that playing a game perfectly guarantees nothing once the other players stop.

Comparative essay on two named anthology poems

Compare how the writers present being left alone in Hide and Seek and La Belle Dame sans Merci. You should make reference to language, form and structure. Support your answer with examples from the poems.

How to answer it

Open with the shared ending. Both poems leave a lone figure in a still, silent outdoor place after the others have gone: Scannell’s child in a darkening garden where nothing stirs, Keats’s knight on a cold hillside where no birds sing (stanzas XI and XII).
Compare how each poem is told. Keats uses two voices, a questioner in stanzas I to III and the knight’s reply from stanza IV; Scannell uses one voice, speaking to you, with the child heard only in two short calls.
Compare cause. Keats gives a reason for the knight’s state, the lady and the pale kings’ warning in his dream; Scannell gives none for the seekers’ departure, and the unexplained laughter of line 13 is all the reader has.
Compare nature. Keats’s withered sedge and silent birds, and Scannell’s watching garden and breath-holding bushes, both seem to reflect the abandoned figure. Ask whether the setting sympathises or simply does not care.
Compare structure. Keats’s last stanza returns to the words of his first, closing the poem in a circle; Scannell ends on an open question. Say what each shape does to the reader.
End with a judgement about which poem presents being left alone as the more complete loss, and why.

Exam tips

Know what the paper sets. Hide and Seek is examined in Section B of Paper 1 of English Literature (4ET1), where you answer one of two questions, with 40 minutes advised. Both questions are comparisons, and both ask about language, form and structure. One names two Part 3 poems; the other names one and asks you to choose the second, which must also come from Part 3 and be a poem in which the question’s focus is significant. Every Part 3 poem is printed for you in a separate Poetry Booklet that comes with the paper. An answer on one poem alone cannot rise above the second of the mark scheme’s five levels.
The poem is printed for you in the exam (the November 2023 booklet numbers every fifth line, as the anthology does), so the credit goes to what you do with a quotation, not to remembering it. Quote a few words, give the line number and analyse them.
Find the hidden pattern. Four rhyming couplets close lines 5, 10, 15 and 20 (out and shout, door and before, lane and again, coat and throat), a regular beat under the chatty surface. After line 20 it breaks, and the last rhyme ties the boast of line 24 to the question of line 27. Some revision guides say the rhyme has no pattern; check it in your own copy.
Track the tenses. Almost every verb is in the present, which keeps the reader inside the game as it happens. The only two simple past verbs, in line 18 and in line 27, both belong to the seekers, and both say that they have stopped.
Treat the middle of the poem as guesswork. Probably (line 6), the predictions of lines 14 to 15 and “must be thinking” (line 16) are the voice’s assumptions about people it cannot see. A strong answer might argue that the child’s mistake is not hiding too well but believing it knows what others are thinking.
Context is not what this section of the paper rewards: it assesses how you analyse language, form and structure and how well you compare. Scannell’s war service and desertions are worth knowing, but if you use them at all, keep it to a clause and tie it to a technique.
Say the child, or the hider. The poem never says whether the child is a boy or a girl, although many guides, Pearson’s own included, say boy. Precision like this is part of reading closely.
Prepare it in all three roles the paper has given it. Pearson’s summaries of past questions show it as the one poem named in Question 3 in June 2018 (personal experiences, with a second poem of your choice), and as one of the two poems named in Question 2 twice: with Half-past Two on childhood in January 2020 (the R paper, sat by centres far from GMT) and with War Photographer on isolation in November 2020 (the paper titled June 2020). The June 2024 Paper 1R mark scheme lists Hide and Seek among the poems in which giving advice is significant, as a second poem for If-.
Learn from November 2024. In that series Question 3 asked you to compare how the writers use vivid descriptions in Hide and Seek and one other poem. The examiners’ report says Half-past Two was the most popular second poem, and that Piano, Prayer Before Birth and War Photographer were also chosen, with some strong results. Comments on structure, the volta and rhyme did not always go on to explain their effect. Across the section, the stronger answers wove language, form and structure together rather than giving each its own paragraph, and gave both poems a fair share.
Quote the anthology, not a revision guide. Line 20 has no comma between its two adjectives in the anthology or the exam’s Poetry Booklet, although Pearson’s Getting Started Guide adds one. Copy the wording in front of you.
Make the register shift work for you. The last line drops the contractions that fill the rest of the poem for a stiff, formal question; say what that change of voice does at the moment the child realises the truth.

Model answer

The question: Compare how the writers present personal experiences in Hide and Seek and one other poem from the anthology.

Both poets present a child left alone by the people who should come back, but only Fanthorpe allows anyone to return. Scannell’s ending turns the game inside out. When the child emerges, the boast that the seekers have been “caught” (line 24) is the seeker’s word, not the hider’s, and the garden completes the reversal: “The darkening garden watches” and the bushes “hold their breath” (lines 25 to 26), copying the stillness the child was ordered into in line 11, as if the world were now hiding from the child. The present participle darkening shows time still running on, while the full stops in the middle of lines 25 and 27 leave silence where an answer should be. The last line then abandons the chatty contractions of the game for the stiff, old-fashioned “they who sought you” (line 27), and its past tense tells the reader that the seeking ended before the child knew. Rhyming sought with caught ties the boast to its refutation. Fanthorpe’s boy, by contrast, is fetched back: his teacher hurries back, admits she had forgotten him and sends him on his way, and he is home in time for tea (lines 25 to 29), so the poem closes on a memory he keeps rather than on a question. Scannell’s choice to stop at the question is what makes his poem the bleaker of the two: the child’s experience is not explained or consoled, only suffered.

Why it works

It opens with a comparative argument, return against abandonment, rather than a summary of either poem, so the line of the whole answer is clear from the first sentence.
Every quotation is a few words long, embedded in the sentence, given a line number and analysed, which suits a paper where the poems are printed in front of you.
It analyses form and structure as well as words: the reversal of roles, the mid-line full stops, the shift of register and the rhyme of caught with sought, each used as evidence for the interpretation rather than as a label.
It notices a small grammatical fact, the past tense of sought, and makes it carry meaning, which is the close reading that separates a strong answer from a competent one.
It brings Half-past Two in on the same idea, the ending, and on method (who returns, how the poem closes), so the comparison is more than two parallel descriptions.
It ends on a judgement that separates the poems, and justifies it, which is the personal response Pearson’s mark scheme says an answer must show.

Compare with

Half-past Two (U A Fanthorpe)

Both leave a child alone while the people responsible are elsewhere, but Fanthorpe’s teacher hurries back and admits she forgot him, while Scannell’s seekers never return or explain.

If- (Rudyard Kipling)

Both instruct a you and both treat patient waiting as a virtue (If-, line 5), but Kipling promises the earth as a reward, while Scannell’s obedient child is rewarded with an empty garden.

La Belle Dame sans Merci (John Keats)

Both end with a lone figure in a still, silent outdoor place after the others have gone, but Keats closes in a circle that repeats his opening, while Scannell ends on an open question.

PoetryEdexcel IGCSE AnthologyChildhood

Hide and Seek: Revision Notes

Vernon Scannell (1922-2007)

Jump to section:

Overview Form & Structure Voice & Speaker Themes Key Quotations Language & Imagery Context Comparisons

At a Glance

• A single continuous block of verse, no stanza breaks
• Present tense throughout: the game unfolds in real time
• Second-person address (“you”) with imperative commands
• Irregular, intermittent rhyme beneath a conversational surface
• Core idea: a child's game becomes a lesson in abandonment
• The child is never named or called a boy or a girl: the poem only says “you”. These notes use he for ease of reading
• In Part 3 of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology: set for English Literature (4ET1) only, not English Language A

Exam Tips for Hide and Seek

Lead with voice and tense. Second-person imperatives plus real-time present tense are the poem's defining methods; explain how they create immersion, suspense and universality before discussing individual images.
Track one image across the poem. The seaside smell of the sacks, from holiday pleasure to throat-catching damp, demonstrates development rather than technique-spotting, which is what top bands require.
Argue an interpretation of the ending. Casual forgetfulness, deliberate desertion, or a parable about self-concealment: commit to a reading, support it, and acknowledge the poem's deliberate ambiguity.
One sentence of Scannell is enough, if any. The anthology poetry question rewards analysis and comparison, not context. Soldier, deserter, boxer, unsentimental poet of childhood fear; connect it to the poem's refusal of comfort, not to biographical speculation.
Use the structural turn. Whatever the question, the pivot from triumphant emergence to empty garden is the poem's key moment; quote the watching garden and the final question, and analyse the silence they create.

See it unfold

The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.

Tension arc

How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.

Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.

Key moments

Moment 1 of 7 · Lines 1-5

The call and the hiding place

A garden toolshed, among sacks

“find me”

Who

The hider
The voice

Why it matters

The poem opens with a request to be found and ends with no one looking, so everything that follows is measured against this first wish.

Pride Before a FallAppearance of a Game, Reality of a Test

Lines 1-5: The call and the hiding place. Hidden among sacks in a garden toolshed that smell of the seaside, the child shouts that they are ready to be found. The voice is sure no one will find this spot, but warns the child to keep their feet out of sight and not to call again. "find me" The poem opens with a request to be found and ends with no one looking, so everything that follows is measured against this first wish.
Lines 6-10: The seekers arrive. On the cold floor the voice guesses where the seekers are searching and warns against sneezing. Then they reach the shed door, whispering, quieter than the child has ever heard them. "whispering at the door" The seekers are within earshot and about to come closer still, yet they are only ever heard; within three lines they are gone, and from then on they exist only in the voice’s guesses.
Lines 11-13: Stillness, and a departure. The voice orders total stillness and silence in four short sentences. The seekers move closer, someone stumbles and mutters, and their words and laughter blur together as they leave. "Hide in your blindness" The seekers leave while the child is working hardest not to be found, so the shared game may already be over at the moment it seems to be going best.
Lines 14-17: The voice’s guesses. The voice tells the child to stay hidden, predicting that the seekers will search the lane and the greenhouse and then come back, and imagines them puzzled by how clever the hider has been. "must be thinking" Every statement about the seekers here is a guess and none is ever confirmed: the child’s confidence rests on thoughts it imagines in other people.
Lines 18-20: The long wait. Time passes. The voice notes how long the seekers have been gone without drawing the obvious conclusion. The child’s legs stiffen, the cold gets through the coat and the damp smell of sand gets into the throat. The body registers what the mind will not: the verb in line 18 is the first simple past in the poem, and it says the seekers left.
Lines 21-24: Coming out to claim the win. Sure of victory, the child pushes off the sacks, stretches and walks out of the shed, calling that they have won and demanding that the seekers admit they have been caught. "you’re the winner" The verdict of winner is reached in the dark shed, on no evidence from outside, and the hider even claims the seeker’s word, caught, so the roles of the game are reversed at the moment of triumph.
Lines 25-27: The empty garden. No one answers. The garden is darkening and still, the bushes do not move and the sun has set. The voice confirms that the child is there, and asks where the seekers have gone. "they who sought you" The poem’s only question closes it, and its past-tense verb confirms that the seeking is over, and suggests it ended some time before the child knew.

Character map

Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.

The voice · instructor and player, perhaps one mind · The hider
The voice gives every order the hider follows, from the first call to the last. It may be the child’s own inner voice, as Pearson’s guide reads it, or a separate, knowing one. Either way its confidence drives the child on, and its last words confirm, too late, that the child is alone.
The hider · playmates, then absentees · The seekers
The game needs both sides to keep playing, and only one does. The seekers are heard but never seen: whispering, stumbling, laughing, then nothing. The child asks to be found in line 1 and claims to have caught them in line 24, and they answer neither.
The voice · guesser and guessed · The seekers
The voice keeps predicting what the seekers are doing and thinking (lines 6 to 7 and 14 to 17), and none of its guesses is confirmed. In line 18 it notes, without seeing what it means, how long they have been away.

Study guide sections

The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.

Key passages for close reading

The call and the hiding place

Lines 1-8

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 1 to 8: from the opening call to the end of line 8, where the voice warns against sneezing when the seekers come in.

1“find me” The first thing the child asks for is to be found. In the game it is a dare, since a good hider wants the seekers to fail; in the poem it becomes a request that nobody answers. Keep it in mind at line 27, where no one is still looking.
2“salty dark” The adjective belongs to taste and smell, the noun to sight, so two senses fuse in one phrase. Carried over from the seaside simile of line 2, it makes the dark cosy and faintly holiday-like. A related smell, of damp sand, returns in line 20, this time moving in the throat, so the pleasant sensation can be read as turning oppressive.
3“prowling” The voice pictures the seekers as animals on the hunt, which makes the hider their prey. That is the thrill of the game: being hunted is exciting for as long as the hunt goes on. The irony is prepared here, because these prowlers will leave without their catch.

The seekers at the door

Lines 9-17

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 9 to 17: from the seekers’ arrival at the shed door to the voice imagining them growing more puzzled as they search.

1“whispering at the door” The seekers have arrived, and in line 12 they come closer still, but they are heard and never seen: every sign of them in lines 9 to 13 is a sound reaching a hider in the dark. The whisper can be read as the excitement of a hunt that is nearly over, or as the seekers conferring about whether to carry on.
2“Hide in your blindness” Line 11 packs four sentences into one line, and the full stops fall like held breaths. The last order is the strangest. In the shed the child really cannot see, but the phrase also names what the ending exposes: the hider has no idea what is happening outside, and makes that not-knowing into a hiding place.
3“scuffle” The seekers leave as one blurred sound. Scuffle can mean a brief tussle or a shuffling walk, and both senses fit, as words and laughter jostle and feet move off. The laughter is never explained. The same line ends with the word gone, which returns in line 26 for the sun.
4“must be thinking” A modal verb of deduction turns a guess into a certainty. With probably in line 6 and the predictions of lines 14 to 15, it shows how much of the middle of the poem is the voice imagining other people’s minds. None of these guesses is ever confirmed, and the ending suggests they were all wrong.

Coming out

Lines 21-27

Where to find it: Anthology page 58, lines 21 to 27: from the decision that it is time to claim the win to the question that ends the poem.

1“you’re the winner” The verdict comes from inside the shed, not from any sign outside: nothing in lines 18 to 20 suggests the seekers are near. Cold, stiffness and a long silence have been read as proof of skill rather than as warnings. A reader who noticed in line 18 that the seekers went away hears the dramatic irony the child cannot.
2“caught you” The hider uses the seeker’s word. Catching is what seekers do, so at the moment of triumph the child claims both roles and demands that the others own up to losing. The phrase also rhymes with the last two words of the poem, three lines later, so the boast and the question are bound together by sound.
3“The darkening garden watches” After the exclamations of lines 22 to 24 comes a short statement and a full stop in mid-line. The present participle darkening shows that time is still running on. The attention the child wanted from the seekers is given only by the garden, and a watcher that says nothing is cold company.
4“hold their breath” The bushes do what the child was told to do in line 11. The tactic the child trusted to win the game has passed to the setting, as though the garden were now hiding from the child, and the hider has become a seeker with nothing left to find.
5“they who sought you” The verb of the title returns in the past tense: the seeking is over. The phrasing is stiff and old-fashioned after lines full of chatty contractions, which lifts the question out of the game. It is the only question mark in the poem, and no one answers it.

Key vocabulary

Toolshed: An outdoor shed for keeping garden tools and equipment. It is the hiding place, somewhere in the garden and out of sight: a small, dark, adult space the child has borrowed for a game, and the place the poem is spoken from until the child walks out in line 23.
Sack: A large bag of strong, coarse cloth used to store things such as potatoes or coal. The child hides under the sacks, which is why the voice says to push them off in line 22. They smell of the seaside (line 2), and the damp smell of sand in line 20 may well come from them too.
Prowling (line 8): Moving about quietly and secretly, as an animal does when it hunts. The word casts the seekers as hunters and the hider as their prey.
Hushed (line 10): Very quiet, spoken in soft, lowered voices. The seekers have never sounded so quiet before: the hush makes the moment tense, and it can be read as the first sign that their behaviour is changing.
Dumb (line 11): Here it means silent, an older sense of the word, not stupid. The order to stay silent is the third of four short commands packed into one line.
Mutter (line 12): To speak quietly and unclearly, under one’s breath, often in complaint. It is one of several sounds that stand in for the seekers, who are never seen.
Scuffle (line 13): As a verb, to struggle confusedly at close quarters, or to walk with a shuffling step. Both senses fit the blurred sound of the seekers moving away.
Own up (line 24): To admit or confess something, especially a fault. The child demands that the seekers confess they have lost; the irony is that what they might really have to admit is leaving.
Sought (line 27): The past tense of seek, the second half of the game’s name. The title is completed only in the poem’s last line, in the past tense, when the seeking has already stopped.
Imperative: A verb in the form of a command: call, push, stretch, do not move. Much of the poem is instructions, and the command form keeps the child, and the reader, under orders until the child steps out of the shed.
Second-person address: Writing that speaks to you. The poem never says I except inside the child’s spoken calls (lines 1 and 23 to 24), so the reader is placed in the hiding place beside the child, or as the child.
Modal verb: A verb such as must, will, might or should that shows how certain, likely or necessary something is. In line 16, must is used to deduce what the seekers are thinking, a certainty the voice has no evidence for.
Caesura: A pause in the middle of a line, usually marked by punctuation. Line 11 has three, and lines 22, 25 and 27 each break at a full stop, so the most intense moments of the poem are also its most broken.
Enjambment: When a sentence runs on from one line into the next without a pause. Lines 6 to 8 run on twice as the voice’s thoughts hurry from the cold floor to the swing to the danger of a sneeze.
Rhyming couplet: Two lines in a row that rhyme. The poem has four full ones, ending on lines 5, 10, 15 and 20, so a regular pattern runs under its conversational surface until the child decides to come out.
Half-rhyme: A near rhyme, in which the sounds are similar but not the same, such as clever and over (lines 16 to 17) or winner and better (lines 21 to 22). They sit beside the full rhymes as a looser echo.
Dramatic irony: When the reader understands something a character does not. From line 13 onward the reader suspects the seekers have gone for good, while the child reads every sign as success.
Synaesthesia: Describing one sense in terms of another, as in the salty dark of line 3, where darkness is given a taste.
Register: The level of formality in language. The poem is almost all everyday speech, full of contractions, until the stiff, old-fashioned phrasing of its final question.

Exam practice

Comparative essay with a second Part 3 poem of your own choice: language, form and structure

How to answer it

Choose a partner poem that lets you compare methods, not just subjects. Half-past Two (a child left alone in a classroom), Piano (an adult overwhelmed by a childhood memory) and La Belle Dame sans Merci (a knight left alone on a cold hillside) all give real contrasts.
Open with a thesis that compares. For example: both poems present an experience from the inside, but Scannell keeps the reader in the moment, in the present tense and the second person, and gives no later perspective from which it can be understood.
Compare voice. Weigh two readings of Scannell’s you, the child’s own inner voice (the reading in Pearson’s Getting Started Guide) or a separate, knowing voice, and set it against the voice of your partner poem.
Compare structure. Scannell’s single block of 27 lines, with rhyming couplets closing lines 5, 10, 15 and 20 and the pattern breaking as the child comes out, against the stanzas and rhyme of your second poem.
Compare endings. Line 27 is the poem’s only question, and no one answers it. Put it beside how your partner poem closes, and decide which leaves its speaker or subject worse off.
Keep every paragraph comparative, with connectives that carry an argument (whereas, while, by contrast), and end with a judgement about what each poet suggests an experience like this does to a person.

Comparative essay on two named anthology poems

Compare how the writers use instructions and advice in If- and Hide and Seek. You should make reference to language, form and structure. Support your answer with examples from the poems.

How to answer it

Start with address. Both poems speak to a you in the present tense: Kipling’s speaker to a young man addressed as his son only in the last line, through conditional clauses beginning If; Scannell’s voice to a hiding child, through imperatives.
Compare the grammar of instruction. Kipling builds one long sentence, as Pearson’s own mark scheme notes, that delays its reward to the end; Scannell uses clipped commands, four of them in line 11 alone.
Use waiting as a bridge. Line 5 of If- praises waiting without tiring of it. Scannell’s child does exactly that, holding out through cold and stiffness in lines 18 to 20, and loses.
Compare what obedience earns. Kipling promises the earth and manhood in his last two lines; Scannell’s child follows every instruction perfectly and is rewarded with a dark, empty garden.
Consider who gives the orders. Kipling’s speaker is a father with experience; Scannell’s voice may be the child’s own and cannot see outside the shed, so its advice is only as good as its guesses (lines 6 to 7 and 14 to 17).
Conclude on attitude: one poem trusts that keeping to the rules leads to success, while the other suggests that playing a game perfectly guarantees nothing once the other players stop.

Comparative essay on two named anthology poems

How to answer it

Open with the shared ending. Both poems leave a lone figure in a still, silent outdoor place after the others have gone: Scannell’s child in a darkening garden where nothing stirs, Keats’s knight on a cold hillside where no birds sing (stanzas XI and XII).
Compare how each poem is told. Keats uses two voices, a questioner in stanzas I to III and the knight’s reply from stanza IV; Scannell uses one voice, speaking to you, with the child heard only in two short calls.
Compare cause. Keats gives a reason for the knight’s state, the lady and the pale kings’ warning in his dream; Scannell gives none for the seekers’ departure, and the unexplained laughter of line 13 is all the reader has.
Compare nature. Keats’s withered sedge and silent birds, and Scannell’s watching garden and breath-holding bushes, both seem to reflect the abandoned figure. Ask whether the setting sympathises or simply does not care.
Compare structure. Keats’s last stanza returns to the words of his first, closing the poem in a circle; Scannell ends on an open question. Say what each shape does to the reader.
End with a judgement about which poem presents being left alone as the more complete loss, and why.

Exam tips

Know what the paper sets. Hide and Seek is examined in Section B of Paper 1 of English Literature (4ET1), where you answer one of two questions, with 40 minutes advised. Both questions are comparisons, and both ask about language, form and structure. One names two Part 3 poems; the other names one and asks you to choose the second, which must also come from Part 3 and be a poem in which the question’s focus is significant. Every Part 3 poem is printed for you in a separate Poetry Booklet that comes with the paper. An answer on one poem alone cannot rise above the second of the mark scheme’s five levels.
The poem is printed for you in the exam (the November 2023 booklet numbers every fifth line, as the anthology does), so the credit goes to what you do with a quotation, not to remembering it. Quote a few words, give the line number and analyse them.
Find the hidden pattern. Four rhyming couplets close lines 5, 10, 15 and 20 (out and shout, door and before, lane and again, coat and throat), a regular beat under the chatty surface. After line 20 it breaks, and the last rhyme ties the boast of line 24 to the question of line 27. Some revision guides say the rhyme has no pattern; check it in your own copy.
Track the tenses. Almost every verb is in the present, which keeps the reader inside the game as it happens. The only two simple past verbs, in line 18 and in line 27, both belong to the seekers, and both say that they have stopped.
Treat the middle of the poem as guesswork. Probably (line 6), the predictions of lines 14 to 15 and “must be thinking” (line 16) are the voice’s assumptions about people it cannot see. A strong answer might argue that the child’s mistake is not hiding too well but believing it knows what others are thinking.
Context is not what this section of the paper rewards: it assesses how you analyse language, form and structure and how well you compare. Scannell’s war service and desertions are worth knowing, but if you use them at all, keep it to a clause and tie it to a technique.
Say the child, or the hider. The poem never says whether the child is a boy or a girl, although many guides, Pearson’s own included, say boy. Precision like this is part of reading closely.
Prepare it in all three roles the paper has given it. Pearson’s summaries of past questions show it as the one poem named in Question 3 in June 2018 (personal experiences, with a second poem of your choice), and as one of the two poems named in Question 2 twice: with Half-past Two on childhood in January 2020 (the R paper, sat by centres far from GMT) and with War Photographer on isolation in November 2020 (the paper titled June 2020). The June 2024 Paper 1R mark scheme lists Hide and Seek among the poems in which giving advice is significant, as a second poem for If-.
Learn from November 2024. In that series Question 3 asked you to compare how the writers use vivid descriptions in Hide and Seek and one other poem. The examiners’ report says Half-past Two was the most popular second poem, and that Piano, Prayer Before Birth and War Photographer were also chosen, with some strong results. Comments on structure, the volta and rhyme did not always go on to explain their effect. Across the section, the stronger answers wove language, form and structure together rather than giving each its own paragraph, and gave both poems a fair share.
Quote the anthology, not a revision guide. Line 20 has no comma between its two adjectives in the anthology or the exam’s Poetry Booklet, although Pearson’s Getting Started Guide adds one. Copy the wording in front of you.
Make the register shift work for you. The last line drops the contractions that fill the rest of the poem for a stiff, formal question; say what that change of voice does at the moment the child realises the truth.

Model answer

The question: Compare how the writers present personal experiences in Hide and Seek and one other poem from the anthology.

Both poets present a child left alone by the people who should come back, but only Fanthorpe allows anyone to return. Scannell’s ending turns the game inside out. When the child emerges, the boast that the seekers have been “caught” (line 24) is the seeker’s word, not the hider’s, and the garden completes the reversal: “The darkening garden watches” and the bushes “hold their breath” (lines 25 to 26), copying the stillness the child was ordered into in line 11, as if the world were now hiding from the child. The present participle darkening shows time still running on, while the full stops in the middle of lines 25 and 27 leave silence where an answer should be. The last line then abandons the chatty contractions of the game for the stiff, old-fashioned “they who sought you” (line 27), and its past tense tells the reader that the seeking ended before the child knew. Rhyming sought with caught ties the boast to its refutation. Fanthorpe’s boy, by contrast, is fetched back: his teacher hurries back, admits she had forgotten him and sends him on his way, and he is home in time for tea (lines 25 to 29), so the poem closes on a memory he keeps rather than on a question. Scannell’s choice to stop at the question is what makes his poem the bleaker of the two: the child’s experience is not explained or consoled, only suffered.

Why it works

It opens with a comparative argument, return against abandonment, rather than a summary of either poem, so the line of the whole answer is clear from the first sentence.
Every quotation is a few words long, embedded in the sentence, given a line number and analysed, which suits a paper where the poems are printed in front of you.
It analyses form and structure as well as words: the reversal of roles, the mid-line full stops, the shift of register and the rhyme of caught with sought, each used as evidence for the interpretation rather than as a label.
It notices a small grammatical fact, the past tense of sought, and makes it carry meaning, which is the close reading that separates a strong answer from a competent one.
It brings Half-past Two in on the same idea, the ending, and on method (who returns, how the poem closes), so the comparison is more than two parallel descriptions.
It ends on a judgement that separates the poems, and justifies it, which is the personal response Pearson’s mark scheme says an answer must show.

Compare with

Half-past Two (U A Fanthorpe)

Both leave a child alone while the people responsible are elsewhere, but Fanthorpe’s teacher hurries back and admits she forgot him, while Scannell’s seekers never return or explain.

If- (Rudyard Kipling)

Both instruct a you and both treat patient waiting as a virtue (If-, line 5), but Kipling promises the earth as a reward, while Scannell’s obedient child is rewarded with an empty garden.

La Belle Dame sans Merci (John Keats)

Both end with a lone figure in a still, silent outdoor place after the others have gone, but Keats closes in a circle that repeats his opening, while Scannell ends on an open question.