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The 15 poems of the WJEC Eduqas GCSE English Literature anthology, examined from summer 2027, with comparison practice and essay plans.
Eduqas students study a single anthology of 15 poems for Component 1. The exam asks you to compare two poems from the anthology, so practising pairings is essential.
Rights notice: Eight of these fifteen poems remain in copyright: Decomposition, Catrin, Blackberry Picking, Kamikaze, War Photographer, Dusting the Phone, Remains and Origin Story. Quotations on this site are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA 1988 §30 (criticism, review, quotation). For the full text, use the Eduqas Poetry Anthology.
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The Schoolboy
William Blake
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Blackberry Picking
Seamus Heaney
In copyright: no study page yet
Sonnet 29 ("I think of thee")
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Cousin Kate
Christina Rossetti
Catrin
Gillian Clarke
In copyright: no study page yet
Dusting the Phone
Jackie Kay
In copyright: no study page yet
Drummer Hodge
Thomas Hardy
Setting: Second Boer War 1899 - NOT World War I.
Disabled
Wilfred Owen
Kamikaze
Beatrice Garland
In copyright: no study page yet
War Photographer
Carol Ann Duffy
In copyright: no study page yet
Remains
Simon Armitage
In copyright: no study page yet
I Shall Return
Claude McKay
Decomposition
Zulfikar Ghose
In copyright: no study page yet
Origin Story
Eve L. Ewing
Eve L. Ewing (b.1986) - American sociologist and poet; *Origin Story* from *Electric Arches* (Haymarket, 2017). Note: distinct from the common phrase "origin story".
In copyright: no study page yet
Strong pairings to practise. Each pair shares a clear thematic link, letting you draw both similarities and contrasts.
Compare Wordsworth's joyful Romantic recollection of daffodils with Heaney's more bittersweet childhood memory of harvest and decay.
Blake critiques the cage of formal schooling; Wordsworth celebrates the freedom of wandering in nature. Both prize unforced encounter with the natural world.
Owen's WWI veteran is alive but broken; Hardy's drummer boy of the Second Boer War (1899) lies anonymously in foreign earth. Compare physical and existential erasure.
Barrett Browning's passionate longing for the absent beloved compared with Rossetti's bitter retrospective on a love built on class betrayal.
Clarke's mother-daughter struggle for separateness compared with Garland's family rejection of a returning kamikaze pilot. Both examine the cost of love within families.
McKay's vow, as a Jamaican in America, to return to the homeland he remembers, compared with Ewing's reimagined origins for Black American identity.
Eduqas examined its previous anthology for the last time in summer 2026, and none of its poems is in the new one. These study pages were written for it.