Full notes for Edexcel GCSE Literature summarising each poem with key quotes and best poems to compare. Everything you need to revise for the relationships poetry anthology. Can be used for making mindmaps, flash cards etc. or just reading through them.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Summary sentence La Belle Dame Sans Merci is about a knight who is abandoned by lady
Context John Keats was a Romantic poet – they often included more emotional
views as well as nature, seen in this poem
He wrote this poem just before dying of TB so perhaps this is why the tone
is so bleak
Form and structure Ballad form, tells a story, also has a regular rhyme scheme as it would’ve
been sung
Parody of courtly love as usually knight has to win over lady but this time
she abandons him, shorter lines at end of each stanza disrupts flow,
reflecting untraditional romance
Cyclical structure highlights how he is doomed to be alone forever
Quotes for some themes:
Effects of love Suffering Negative emotions
• What can ail thee • Alone and palely • So haggard and so
• No birds sing loitering woe-begone
• She took me • On the cold hill side • Fading rose
• Lily on thy brow • Ah! Woe betide!
The two best poems My Last Duchess because love can be destructive
to compare this with Neutral tones because they suffer from the effects of love
A Child to his Sick Grandfather
Summary sentence The poem A Child to his Sick Grandfather is told from the perspective of a
child, upset that his grandfather is dying
Context Joanna Baillie was a Romantic poet, often wrote about emotional subjects,
like the subject of this poem
She was Scottish, language reflects this e.g. ‘aye’
Form and structure Regular rhyme schemes and consistent stanza length shows reliability of
grandfather
Last lines of each stanza are shorter – grandfather is slowly fading away
Last lines have half-rhyme, more unsettling in contrast to rhyming couplets,
last line is very negative, monosyllabic, marks death of grandfather
Quotes for some themes:
Family relationships Loss Memory
• I’ll lead you kindly by • You do not hear me, • You used to smile and
the hand Dad stroke my head
• When you wake we’ll • Weary fire turns blue • How lank and thin
aye be near to fill old • I’m vexed to see you, your beard hangs
dad his cheer dad down!
• But now, I wot not • You love a story, dad?
how it be
The two best poems My Father Would Not Show Us because they contain loss in family
to compare this with Nettles because they are both family relationships
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