What this grid does
The AQA Love and Relationships question always asks you to compare two poems. The hardest part is not analysis — it is choosing the second poem under timed pressure. This printable solves that problem with a single A3 sheet you can pin above your desk.
Down the left-hand column sit all 15 anthology poems. Across the top run six theme clusters: parental love, romantic love, loss and distance, memory, place, and time. Each cell carries a tick, a half-tick, or a blank, so you can see at a glance which poems pair well on which idea.
How the grid is structured
The 15 poems on the vertical axis are the full AQA anthology: Sonnet 29, Love's Philosophy, Porphyria's Lover, Mother, Any Distance, Follower, Climbing My Grandfather, Eden Rock, Walking Away, Before You Were Mine, Letters from Yorkshire, Neutral Tones, When We Two Parted, Winter Swans, Singh Song! and The Farmer's Bride.
The six theme clusters are deliberately broader than the AQA sub-headings, because comparison questions reward students who can see ideas travelling across categories. Eden Rock, for example, ticks parental love, memory, place, and time — which means it is a flexible second-poem choice for almost any prompt about family.
Five ready-built comparison spines
A spine is a one-line argument that connects two poems. The grid suggests five strong pairings, each with a thesis hook you can adapt to a question.
- Parental love across time: Eden Rock x Mother, Any Distance x Follower — three poems where a child watches a parent recede, and the speaker's sense of self shifts as the parent moves out of reach.
- Romantic distance: Letters from Yorkshire x Walking Away — distance as the medium that proves love rather than threatens it.
- Love that fails: Neutral Tones x When We Two Parted — winter imagery and grammatical past tense staging the post-mortem of a finished relationship.
- Possession and power: Porphyria's Lover x The Farmer's Bride — male speakers who name love but enact control, with form (dramatic monologue, irregular stanzas) exposing the imbalance.
- Joyful love: Sonnet 29 x Singh Song! — two voices that refuse melancholy, using extended metaphor and dialect respectively to celebrate present-tense devotion.
How to use it during practice
Print the grid in colour and keep it visible while you plan timed comparisons. When a past-paper question lands on your desk, find the named poem in the left column, then scan rightwards for its strongest cluster. Drop down the column under that cluster and your second poem is already chosen.