Summary AQA English Literature A-level - Anthology: love poetry through the ages pre-1900 - A* analysis
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Course
Anthology: love poetry through the ages pre-1900
Institution
AQA
My analysis of ALL the anthology love poems through the ages (pre-1900), covering AO1 and AO2, I used to get an A* in my 2023 A-level (which I compared to the Great Gatsby, but can be used as stand-alone poetry revision too). Also includes notes on context (AO3) - of the author and historical; and ...
KEY =
● Bullet point = Structural point, meter etc (i.e. not literary techniques)
- ? = Link to Great Gatsby
- ? / ? / ? = yellow poems link less well to Gatsby, green the most
- ? = Context
- ? = Link to other love poems in the anthology
➔ ? = literary critics
At an Inn by Thomas Hardy: unrequited / barrier / lost love / appearance vs reality / estrangement
● About Hardy's unrequited, unattainable relationship with the married, spirited, and aristocratic
Florence Henniker (38). Hardy (58) met her in 1893. They had lunch at George inn in
Winchester together and the people working there thought they were a couple which pleased
him, but they did nothing sexual as she only wanted a platonic friendship.
● Unrequited love like with George and somewhat Gatsby, or inconsistent love.
● Iambic pentameter
● Start physically close and emotionally distant, but end up the opposite
● Alternating line length shows the fluctuations of his hope versus reality/disappointment
● Regular form shows their comfort in friendship BUT tight structure of octets is like the
strictness of the era vs Gatsby 1920s freeness and infidelity
● Ironic as in these are enjambment - suggesting he cannot control his love. Like G
● First 2 stanzas are fantasy & the rest reality
● Shift to 3rd person in the 3rd stanza, as if questioning God (Hardy was agnostic)
● Cyclical structure starts and ends with a memory. Speaker helpless returns like La Belle
● "We seem not what we aching are" = repetition of pronoun 'we' in stanza 1 and final shows
the figures as mutual lovers vs G & D "he had committed himself to the following of a grail".
Final stanza suggest they are together in spirit
- "Strangers" = anonymity creates freedom from their marriages. Like Tom and Myrtle or Daisy
and Gatsby.
- "Strangers sought" & "catering care" = alliteration + consonance suggests familiarity,
togetherness, treated well by staff at an inn
- "Care" and "were" = half rhymes reflect incompatibility & a barrier
- "Veiled smiles' = personification to suggest he is suppressing the romantic fulfilment / don't
say things openly. double entendre for a wedding veil, or alludes to an illusion
- "Opined us more than friends - " = repetition, he is fixated on how they are perceived and how
they could be romantic, shows he wants to be more than friends. Hyphen shows he is paused
thinking about it. Like Myrtle, but especially Gatsby! / 'The kiss their zeal foretold, and now
deemed come, came not: ' = staff expects them to kiss, likely Hard too. Colon as caesura
highlights disappointment
- "Swift sympathy… living love" = alliteration, creates energy and quick heartbeat.
Personification, a powerful living thing like to Gatsby
- "Maybe" = suggests doubt and hopefulness
- "Spheres above, nade them our ministers" astrological supernatural imagery, feels like
destiny. Like star crossed lovers in romeo and juliet
- 'Ah God that bliss is theirs' = Highest is power is God which protects him. Dramatic irony to
quote the workers at the inn as they believe they are a couple but are not + see their love and
are jealous of it
- "Quicks the world" = suggests his feelings are so strong that it makes the world spin faster
- "Left alone" = unusual in the Victorian era. Like Gatsby being alone with married Daisy
- Heavenly "love light" & "Love's own pair" = couple are personified as the embodiment of
idealised love, but aren't actually in love so dramatic irony. Nick about Jordan? Suggests
hopeful love
- "Love light never shone between us" = relationship is not physically realised. Volta to
downcast tone, unrequited love. Lack of alliteration highlights this.
- "But… breath" = more plosive, shift from fantasy to reality
- "Chilled" = pathetic fallacy, verb 'chilled' suggests relationship is cold when together, only
warm when others are around them speculating
, - "Palsied [means paralysed] onto Death" & 'pane-fly's" = dramatic shift. Entrapment by social
boundaries. Homophone for 'pane' and pain. The flies' death symbolises the death of the
opportunity for them to be romantic as it has passed. And the relationship is pointless as a fly
flying into a window. Nick looks at the others through a window
- Sexual / euphemisms = "Kiss", "come", "came" & "bloom" - virginity or blushing / fertility +
relationship grows, "sport" - sex
- "Love lingered numb." & "came not" = end stopped silences any hope & disappointment, love
is not physically consummate
- "And now" = emphasises the importance of time. Like Gatsby
- 'Why cast he on our port a bloom not ours? Why shaped us for his sport in after-hours?' =
repeated questions to God, who has given him a good opportunity but cannot fulfil it. Or why
does love provoke them but give them no opportunity to express it
- 'We seem not what we aching are' = must keep up appearances
- "Aching" & repeated escalations of "O" = love is painful, they are not together but want to be.
Like Gatsby. Demonstration of how cruel love is.
- Sibilant "Severing seas and land" = hyperbolic barriers like Hardy who was working class &
Florence aristocratic (Fitzgerald and Zelda / Myrtle & Gatsby both of whom could't attain the
Buchanans)
- "Stand" & "stood then!" = repetitive alliterative couplings, subconsciously on speakers mind
- 'Ere death, once let us stand as we stood then!' = exclamatory - let's be a couple. Yearning for
the past, past tense - "can't repeat the past?'
➔ Radhika Goel = 'A sharp critic of the traditional Victorian values which destroyed lives'
A Song (Absent from thee) by John Wilmot: Idealised / sacred / sexual / unattainable
- Restoration - Charles's reinstatement marked the end of an intensely moralistic, Puritanical
period of English history, and the English upper classes were more than ready for some fun.
● Using a love song from satrises traditional ideas of romance
● Repeated personal pronouns "my" & " I" = selfish
● Melancholy tone - he's fearful of losing lover + knows what he's doing is wrong but cannot
stop infidelity and is unlikely to change
● Passive and helplessness is almost feminine.
● "Return" + "Mourn" & "Heaven" and "Forgiven' = slant rhymes suggest incompatibility
between the poem's romantic style and unromantic message
● Accepts the woman's charges and adds to them (line 2 & 5), aggression turned inward vs
Tom whose aggression is outward, but is so carless that inwards he doesn't think about his
action
- Repeated "Absent" = shows lovers absence & distance which causes his upset
- "Anguish from thee I languish still" = cliche 1st line as a placater to make her more likely to
give him what he wants. Anastrophe (inversion of usual order).
- "From thine arms" = another cliche
- Verb "languish" = physically ill from being away from her, but hyperbole and disingenuous.
Like La Belle & Gatsby "pale"
- Change from fluid "Languish" to consonant "still" = rapidly changes from flattering her to not,
untrustworthy
- "Thee" = intimate, but never uses her name
- "Ask me not when I return?" = rhetorical, doesn't want to be questioned as he knows he's
wrong OR he doesn't know the answer as he cant control his desires
- "To wish all Day, all Night to Mourn" = hyperbolic, double entendre for morning/pun for
mourning his lover. OR paradoxical, Wilmot doesn't like predictability and routine
- "Fantastic mind" = doesn't just sexualise her, values her for her mind
- "Let me fly" = like Garden of Love, wants to be free
- "Dear" = affectionate to persuade her, but trochee makes him sound insincere
- "Torments it" = the only way he can test their love is testing the limits of their relationship.
Religious self punishment & sexual torment. Ironic, he pretends cheating on her is
torment/hard on him
- "Deserves" & "fool" = self deprecating, he knows what he is doing is wrong
- "That tears my fixt Heart from my Love" = violent imagery & romantic which makes her feel
special although he's going to stray
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