Poetry

Route A opens with the one part of this qualification where you are allowed to have the text in front of you. Section A of Paper 2A gives you a choice of two questions on the OxfordAQA anthology People and Places, worth 30 marks, and you sit it with a clean copy of the anthology on the desk. Clean is the operative word: the specification and the front cover both say the text must not be annotated and must not contain additional notes or materials, so what you carry in is twenty poems and nothing else.

That changes what preparation is for. You are not memorising quotations; you are building the map that lets you find the right two poems in ninety seconds and say something worth 30 marks about them. This lesson gives you that map, shows how OxfordAQA's own mark schemes group the poems, and works through the analysis of a single poem and then a full comparison of two, using anthology poems that are out of copyright so the analysis can quote them properly.