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Master all 15 poems in the AQA Love and Relationships anthology. Each study page includes annotations, key quotations, context, and comparison notes to help you write top-grade essays.
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Rights notice: Seven of these fifteen poems remain in copyright — Heaney’s Follower, Nagra’s Singh Song! and Waterhouse’s Climbing My Grandfather (© Faber & Faber), Causley’s Eden Rock (© David Higham Associates), Day-Lewis’s Walking Away (© Peters Fraser & Dunlop), Duffy’s Before You Were Mine (© Picador / Pan Macmillan) and Sheers’s Winter Swans (© Seren Books). Quotations are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA 1988 §30 (criticism, review, quotation). For full text, students should consult the board-licensed AQA Anthology of Poetry.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A speaker overwhelmed by thoughts of her beloved compares them to vines around a tree.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A speaker uses nature’s harmony to plead for a kiss.
Robert Browning
A disturbed speaker preserves a moment of love through murder.
Simon Armitage
A son measures the growing distance between himself and his mother as he leaves home.
Seamus Heaney
A boy who once trailed his ploughing father is now the one being followed.
Andrew Waterhouse
A grandson lovingly maps his grandfather as a vast mountain to be climbed.
Charles Causley
Long-dead parents wait at the riverbank for their child to cross over.
C. Day-Lewis
A father watches his son leave for the first time and grieves the loss.
Carol Ann Duffy
A daughter imagines her mother’s vibrant life before motherhood claimed her.
Maura Dooley
Two voices stay close across hundreds of miles through the small ritual of letters.
Thomas Hardy
A speaker revisits a winter scene where love withered into disillusionment.
Lord Byron
A lover mourns a secret affair he must grieve in silence.
Owen Sheers
A wordless walk by a lake mends a fracture between two lovers.
The exam asks you to compare two poems. Choose poems that share a theme but differ in tone - for example, the obsessive love of Porphyria's Lover against the tender longing of Sonnet 29.
Each poem has a constructed speaker. Analyse how that voice presents love - possessive, nostalgic, joyful or grieving - and what techniques the poet uses to shape it.
Top-band responses compare how poets use language, structure and form. Notice how Heaney uses end-stopped lines to create steadiness while Duffy uses fragmented imagery.
You don't need to memorise entire poems. Focus on short, technique-rich quotations you can analyse in depth.
Head back to the Poetry hub to explore the AQA Power and Conflict anthology, the AQA Worlds and Lives anthology, and unseen poetry techniques.
Back to Poetry Hub