Love and Relationships
Poetry Cluster
AQA GCSE Revision Notes
English Literature
© irevise.com 2016
1 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
© irevise.com 2016.
All revision notes have been produced by mockness ltd for irevise.com.
Email: [email protected]
Copyrighted material.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, reprinting,
or otherwise without either the prior written permission of irevise.com or a license permitting copying
in the United Kingdom issued by the copyright licensing Agency.
2 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Table of Contents
Contents ................................................................................................................................. 5
When We Two Parted ............................................................................................................. 7
Context/Summary.............................................................................................................................. 8
Annotation ......................................................................................................................................... 9
Love’s Philosophy .................................................................................................................. 11
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 12
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 13
Porphyria’s Lover .................................................................................................................. 15
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 17
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 18
Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’.................................................................................................. 20
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 21
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 22
Neutral Tones ....................................................................................................................... 23
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 24
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 25
Letters from Yorkshire ........................................................................................................... 26
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 27
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 28
The Farmer’s Bride ................................................................................................................ 29
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 31
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 32
Walking Away ....................................................................................................................... 34
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 35
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 36
Eden Rock ............................................................................................................................. 37
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 38
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 39
Follower ............................................................................................................................... 40
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 41
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 42
From Book of Matches, ‘Mother, any distance’ ...................................................................... 43
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 44
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 45
3 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Before You Were Mine .......................................................................................................... 46
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 47
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 48
Winter Swans........................................................................................................................ 49
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 50
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 51
Singh Song! ........................................................................................................................... 52
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 54
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 55
Climbing My Grandfather ...................................................................................................... 57
Context/Summary............................................................................................................................ 58
Annotation ....................................................................................................................................... 59
Sample Answers .................................................................................................................... 60
Compare how poets present attitudes towards a parent in ‘Follower’ and in one other poem from
Love and Relationships. ................................................................................................................... 60
Compare how poets present ideas about the effects of relationship difficulties in ‘When We Two
Parted’ and in one other poem from Love and Relationships. ........................................................ 61
Compare how poets present the state of being in love in ‘Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’’ and in one
other poem from Love and Relationships. ...................................................................................... 62
4 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Get A-Grade Membership
Why become A-Grade member?







Access unlimited Revision Premium revision notes Created by
top class teachers and subject experts.
Access revision content across a wide range of subjects.
Access almost 1000 maths tutorials helping you understand,
learn and approach maths questions to ace your exams.
Access A-Grade Sample Answers to help steer you in the right
direction.
Access mock exam papers (unseen) and marking schemes to help
you continuously practice.
Access revision notes any time anywhere and on your mobile
device.
Only £4.99 per month.
“The Sample Answers, revision notes, and all their Maths videos really made me feel
comfortable in my exams. They improved my confidence so much and I found my grades
improving. Definitely recommend them to everyone!”
Rob Shaw, London
Get A-Grade Membership
5 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Contents
Poems (Poem–Summary/Context–Annotation)
1. When We Two Parted by Lord Byron
2. Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley
3. Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Browning
4. Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
5. Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy
6. Letters From Yorkshire by Maura Dooley
7. The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew
8. Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis
9. Eden Rock by Charles Causley
10. Follower by Seamus Heaney
11. Mother, any distance by Simon Armitage
12. Before You Were Mine by Carol Ann Duffy
13. Winter Swans by Owen Sheers
14. Singh Song! By Daljit Nagra
15. Climbing My Grandfather by Andrew Waterhouse
6 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
When We Two Parted
When We Two Parted
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow –
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell in mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me –
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well –
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met –
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? –
With silence and tears.
7 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Context/Summary
Lord George Gordon Byron was well-known in his time and remains well-known today for
his work in poetry, through which he was able to express much of the melancholy and inner
emotion that was never seen in him, save through the written word.
During his lifetime, he was also known for his numerous scandals and debts, and for his own
self-imposed exile from his home country. And despite all of this chaotic insanity that
followed him around, his poetry paints a very different picture of the man.
Poems such as ‘When We Two Parted’ indicate a different aspect to Byron’s many
relationships, and his feelings about them throughout his life.
8 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Annotation
When We Two Parted
When we two parted (separated)
In silence and tears, (there was nothing left to say; they both knew it was time)
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years, (suggests that their separation lasted ‘years’; a modern interpretation
could be that they were ‘broken-hearted’ at the very thought of breaking up for long
before they actually did)
Pale grew thy cheek and cold, (the lover lost their warmth towards the narrator)
Colder thy kiss; (they no longer kissed the narrator with the same warmth or feeling)
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this. (their parting was a sign of things to come, how ‘sorrow’-ful they would
be)
The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow – (the elements warned of what was about to happen/the
significance of the event)
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now. (the narrator continues to draw links between what happened and its
significance on his life in the aftermath of it)
Thy vows are all broken, (did they vow to always be together; were they married?)
And light is thy fame; (an ambiguous description: does the narrator mean that their lover’s
fame is insignificant, well-travelled because it is ‘light’ like a feather, etc.?
I hear thy name spoken, (the ex-lover is well-known enough that the narrator hears their
name in others’ conversation on occasion)
And share in its shame. (this could suggest that the ex-lover’s reputation is not a positive
one; perhaps they were indeed married and their separation has helped to sully the
reputation of the narrator’s lover, whom we assume is a woman)
They name thee before me, (is the woman more famous/regarded than the narrator;
were people used to naming them as a couple?)
A knell in mine ear; (the sound of death; this signifies the death of their love and the
emptiness of the narrator’s life of the present)
A shudder comes o'er me – (how the narrator responds to any mention of his former
lover; she haunts him like a ghost)
Why wert thou so dear? (he now questions how he could have loved someone whose
absence has hurt him so much)
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well – (it seems as if the people who speak of her do not do so
carelessly; they don’t know that the narrator used to be in a relationship with her)
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell. (he will always regret what happened between them – their
separation, we assume, rather than the relationship itself)
In secret we met – (‘secret’ suggests that their meeting could have been illicit; was it an
affair?)
9 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
In silence I grieve, (the narrator is unable to talk about his grief, perhaps to ensure that his
ex-lover’s reputation is not damaged by their former relationship_
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive. (he grieves the fact that she no longer loves him the way she did, then
questions if she ever truly loved him)
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? –
With silence and tears. (the narrator would greet his ex-lover exactly as he parted from
her, in ‘silence and tears’, but this time, we assume, because of his grief in the ‘long years’
since they parted)
10 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Love’s Philosophy
Love's Philosophy
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle —
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother:
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea —
What are all these kisses worth,
If thou kiss not me?
11 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Context/Summary
The central thematic concerns in Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined
Romanticism in his era: beauty, nature, political liberty, passions, creativity and imagination.
Shelley’s fervent belief in beauty and its relation to happiness and nature is evident in his
best-known poems ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘To a Skylark’.
Unlike Byron in ‘She Walks in Beauty’, for instance, who connects beauty and goodness but
only when goodness is related to youth and innocence (in the image of the woman), or
Keats, who, like Oscar Wilde, believed in aesthetics for its own sake, Shelley believes in the
power of art to transform society in a positive way.
12 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Annotation
Love's Philosophy
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion; (the narrator muses on how everything in the universe is related in
some way; that things must relate to each other; ‘no man is an island’)
Nothing in the world is single; (as the previous line; ‘nothing’ is dependent solely on itself
for existence)
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle — (it is God’s will and nature’s prerogative for beings to
‘mingle’ with each other)
Why not I with thine? (the narrator questions why he cannot mix with her; ‘thine’ implies
her things, rather than here; this can be interpreted as a sexual reference)
See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother: (the narrator repeats the pattern and ideas of the opening four
lines of the first stanza; it is natural for things to mix with and relate to each other)
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea —
What are all these kisses worth, (just some of the aspects of life and nature that the
narrator deems beautiful)
If thou kiss not me? (despite the beauty of these things, the narrator believes they mean
nothing and are of little importance without this woman’s ‘kiss’)
13 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.
Get A-Grade Membership
Why become A-Grade member?







Access unlimited Revision Premium revision notes Created by
top class teachers and subject experts.
Access revision content across a wide range of subjects.
Access almost 1000 maths tutorials helping you understand,
learn and approach maths questions to ace your exams.
Access A-Grade Sample Answers to help steer you in the right
direction.
Access mock exam papers (unseen) and marking schemes to help
you continuously practice.
Access revision notes any time anywhere and on your mobile
device.
Only £4.99 per month.
“The Sample Answers, revision notes, and all their Maths videos really made me feel
comfortable in my exams. They improved my confidence so much and I found my grades
improving. Definitely recommend them to everyone!”
Rob Shaw, London
Get A-Grade Membership
14 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster – AQA GCSE Revision Notes – English Literature.