Edexcel International GCSE English Literature · Paper 1 Section B
Sixteen poems. One question. Forty minutes.
Every poem in the Anthology explained method by method, the comparison pairings mapped, and a feedback tool that reads your comparison writing the way a teacher would. No grades, ever.
Meet the poems → Find a pairing → Get Feedback on Your Writing ✎
The anthology
The sixteen
If–
Advice from father to son: the impossible checklist for being a man.
No. 2 · Louis MacNeicePrayer Before Birth
An unborn child pleads for protection from the world awaiting it.
No. 3 · Imtiaz DharkerBlessing
A burst pipe turns water into treasure, and a slum into celebration.
No. 4 · Sujata BhattSearch for My Tongue
Losing a mother tongue, and the dream in which it grows back.
No. 5 · U. A. FanthorpeHalf-past Two
A small boy in detention slips outside clock time altogether.
No. 6 · D. H. LawrencePiano
A song drags a grown man back to childhood, against his will.
No. 7 · Vernon ScannellHide and Seek
A childhood game sours into a lesson about being left behind.
No. 8 · William ShakespeareSonnet 116
A definition of love that will not bend, alter or remove.
No. 9 · John KeatsLa Belle Dame sans Merci
A knight enchanted, abandoned and left loitering, palely, forever.
No. 10 · Alice WalkerPoem at Thirty-Nine
A daughter misses her father, and becomes him at the stove.
No. 11 · Carol Ann DuffyWar Photographer
In a darkroom, suffering develops into Sunday-supplement pictures.
No. 12 · William BlakeThe Tyger
Questions hammered at a creator who could frame such fearful symmetry.
No. 13 · Robert BrowningMy Last Duchess
A duke shows off a portrait, and accidentally confesses to everything.
No. 14 · John AgardHalf-caste
A slur dismantled with wit, Picasso, and half of one leg.
No. 15 · Dylan ThomasDo not go gentle into that good night
A son begging his father to fight death with rage.
No. 16 · Christina RossettiRemember
A farewell that ends by choosing the beloved’s happiness over memory.
The exam
One comparison, done well
Section B gives you a choice of two questions; each asks you to compare two poems, usually one named and one of your choice. The poems are printed with the paper, so nothing rests on memory: the marks (30, split between AO2 analysis and AO3 comparison) go to what you notice and how you connect it. The Exam Skills page has the method; the Comparisons page has the map.
Writing that improves
Feedback, not grades
Paste a comparison paragraph or full essay into the marking desk and get margin annotations like a teacher writes on paper: what works, where to push, and whether your comparison is woven through or stapled on. It will challenge device-spotting every time: naming a simile earns nothing until you say what it does.
How to use this site
Three ways in
- Studying a poem? Read it in your Anthology first (aloud, ideally), then open its guide page and mark up your copy as you go.
- Revising? Work in pairs, of poems: pick a pairing from the Comparisons page and build a quotation table for the two together.
- Writing? Take a practice question from the Exam Skills page, write for forty minutes, then run it through the marking desk and redraft.
Teaching the anthology? The teacher area has the scheme of work and assessment guidance.