Unit 2:
Poetry Across Time
Moon on the Tides: “Relationships” Cluster
and Unseen Poetry
Key Information:


Exam: May 24th
Worth 35% of the English Lit GCSE



Section A: 23%
Section B: 12%
1hour 15minutes long


Section A: 45 minutes
Section B: 30 minutes
Section A (36 marks):
Poetry from Moon on the Tides





Organised by clusters
Ours is the Relationships cluster
Choice of two questions per cluster: choose
one question
Each question will ask you to compare one
named poem to a poem of your choice
(from the same cluster)
45 minutes
Section A: Named poems

Any of the following poems may be named on the
exam so you must know them thoroughly:
'The
Manhunt'
'Hour'
'Quickdraw'
'Ghazal'
'Praise Song for My Mother'
'Harmonium'

‘Sonnet
116’
‘Sonnet 43’
'To His Coy Mistress'
'The Farmer's Bride'
'Nettles'
'Born Yesterday’
‘In Paris with You’, ‘Brothers’, ‘Sister Maude’ won’t be
named, but may be the best fit for comparison.
Section B (18 marks):
Unseen Poetry




Provided with an ‘unseen’ poem (not
known in advance)
One question (no choices)
30 minutes
Effectively tests your ability to analyse
poetry independently.
Assessment Objectives
1 - Respond to texts critically and
imaginatively; select and evaluate
relevant textual detail to illustrate
and support interpretations
2 - Explain how language, structure
and form contribute to writers’
presentation of ideas, themes and
settings
3 - Make comparisons and explain
links between texts, evaluating
writers’ different ways of expressing
meaning and achieving effects
Sec A
Sec B Total


15%


10%

10%
What they’re looking for:


A skills-based approach, making a personal
response to a range of poems.
You will be expected to respond to:




Themes, ideas and issues presented by the poet
Form, structure and language (including imagery and
sound)
In other words, you’re analysing the themes
and ideas of the poem through methods that
writers use to communicate them.
Examiners want to see you making genuinely
independent and thoughtful responses.
Poetic devices aim achieve one of
the following effects:





Create an image in your head
Put a sound in your mouth
Emphasise something
Link to something
Whenever you want to talk about a poetic device,
think: What is the writer trying to achieve?
Which of these does it do for me? It may well be
different from one person to the next.
From the Chief Examiner’s
Report


“…it was a pleasure to see so many interesting and
illuminating responses to a new anthology of
poetry. This was especially true of those candidates
who were equipped with the ability to respond with
confidence and independence to the poems
themselves as well as to the actual process and
demands of a poetry examination.”
“It was particularly interesting to see the way
candidates responded to unseen poetry … the
responses were fresh, individual and very
illuminating”
General Advice - don’t just list techniques

“Using technical detail as a framework and foundation
for writing, rather than an aid to understanding
meaning, limits candidate performance. Statements
pointing out the use of enjambment for example, or
the fact that a poem is written ‘in free verse’ or with ‘a
rhyme scheme’ tended to lead to some rather
generalised comments which offered very little in
terms of developing understanding of ideas and
themes. Language and technique is most successfully
analysed when linked explicitly to themes and ideas
rather than in isolation.”
General Advice - focus on key sections

“Those students who attempt to write about
every line of the poem, or in other words
give a blow-by-blow account, don’t generally
perform as well as they might. It is
impossible in the time to provide a detailed
analysis of the whole poem, so students
would be better linking analysis of two or
three key moments / words / images to the
overall thesis.”
AO1 - clearly identify central ideas in poem

Students who can identify, discuss and
wrestle with the feelings/attitudes/ideas in
the poems can achieve Bands 4 and 5 with
relative ease … It may be worthwhile … to
begin by writing a sentence or two
summarising what the poem is about in
terms of themes and ideas, which should
immediately be achieving in at least Band 3.”
AO2 - focus on writer’s construction of ideas

“There is widespread variation in students’ ability
to deal with ‘the writer’ … a large number of
students … continue to write about the poems,
characters and events as though they are real,
lacking any evidence that they understand the texts
to have been constructed by someone … The ability
to try to say why some of these choices have been
made lies at the heart of achievement in this strand
and relates in the first instance to words …”
AO2 - pick out key methods that construct ideas

“A strategy of choosing a few details
(quotations) from each poem and grappling
with what the poet was trying to
say/suggest/imply would pay dividends:
even if the interpretation is somewhat
debatable, the student should be accessing
the Band 4 descriptor …”
AO3: Section A - know all the poems

“students need to know the rest of the poems in the
cluster well. Examiners saw many instances where
students wrote well about each of the poems
individually but struggled to make meaningful
comparisons owing to a poor choice of second text,
thus limiting their chances of achieving well on this
strand from the outset … more than one
comparative comment must be made in order to
access Band 3 and higher here.”
AO3: Section A - use brief intro to account
for your choice of comparison poem

“a simple strategy of informing the examiner of the
second choice of poem and the reasons why in
terms which compare it to the named poem is likely
to produce an opening paragraph which is already
accessing Band 3 at least. If this strategy is linked
to that suggested in AO1 above i.e. a comparison of
the two poems in terms of themes/ideas, the
student is well on the way to climbing the ladder of
the mark scheme.”
Section A - try to link poems throughout

“Having a sound grasp of ideas enabled the
most successful comparisons. Also, this
enabled a comparative approach to the
response itself, rather than the rather
limiting ‘Poem A + Poem B + final
comparative paragraph’ approach.”
Section A - purposeful intro and conclusion

“Introductions and conclusions tended to be
rather redundant: they may enable a student
to just ‘start writing’ which is useful, but
don’t often lead to many marks. It might be
better to start with answering the question
and end with a comparative point that is
more than ‘the poem I preferred was.’”

[Yes, this contradicts a point made about AO1 but the idea is, make them sharp, short and
start/sum up comparison.]
Section B - one read isn’t enough

“The key to doing well on Section B is to
read the poem several times and this
was clearly shown by one answer which
began to write a rather unusual response to
the poem. The student then wrote ‘When I
first read this poem, I thought … but now
that I have read it again, I can see that
the poet is …’”