Tackling the Unseen Poetry Component of the Exam

The Unseen Poetry component of the AQA English Literature GCSE comes in Paper 2, and as such is the final thing you complete for this GCSE. You will be given two poems you have not studied and will be given two tasks to complete: 

1. Analyse a given theme in the first unseen poem, for 24 marks.

2. Compare how a given theme is addressed in both poems, for 8 marks.

You need to complete both tasks, and read/annotate both poems, in just 45 minutes.

This guide will break down a recommended approach to each task. This guide focuses on 27.1. – analysing the first unseen poem.

The first thing to note is that the poem you will be given is designed to be accessible to all, so don’t be daunted! The question will also focus on a familiar, universal theme: like family, growing up, or school. Let’s jump in.

It will tell you which theme to look out for before you start reading. It will also remind you that there are 24 marks for this question, so you need to be quite thorough. It won’t remind you that there is no need for AO3 (context) – but that remains true.

It is not unusual not to know where to start, so we recommend using FIRST to get your initial annotations down: First/last line, Imagery, Repetition, Structure, and Title. Look at each aspect and consider how it relates to the theme from the question. Look at the example annotated below as per the question:

In ‘Make the Ordinary Come Alive’, how does the poet present the speaker’s feelings about parenting? (24 marks)

Make the Ordinary Come Alive

Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is a way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples, and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

You now have sufficient material to compose a response.

Now you have five core annotations, you simply arrange them chronologically and you have a response. Before you jump into the composition, though, take them together and determine what you think you’d say if you only had one sentence to answer the question with. This will be your first sentence: your thesis. 

Look at the example below:

In ‘Make the Ordinary Come Alive’, how does the poet present the speaker’s feelings about parenting? (24 marks)

The poet presents the speaker’s feelings about parenting as a series of advisory statements intended to encourage an open-minded approach to prosaic things in their assumed children.

Our first impression of the poet’s feelings about parenting come from the title, whose imperative “Make” immediately gives the impression that the poem will be advisory, and whose juxtaposition of “Ordinary” and “Alive” suggests that following the advice therein will turn preconceptions on their head and improve things distinctly for parents. More specifically, from the nominalised adjective “Ordinary” in the title, we expect a treatise on appreciating simplicity. The first line of the poem immediately confirms this first impression, deploying another imperative “Do not ask” before endorsing a rejection of “extraordinary lives” for the reader’s imagined children. Such a controversial statement about not encouraging children to “strive for [the] extraordinary” is only resolved by the final line of the poem, which reassures the reader with the definitive declarative: “The extraordinary will take care of itself”. 

To carry the alternative message of parenting goals, so that the final line can be believed, the poet deploys through the speaker some imagery that encapsulates the new philosophy. When the speaker recommends showing children “the joy of tasting / tomatoes, apples, and pears”, he ties together the prosaic concrete, “tomatoes, apples, and pears”, to the desirable abstract, “joy”, using the dynamic verb “tasting” – communicating effectively that pleasure comes from sensory experiences, provided as opportunities by good parents who “Show [their children]” such things. Indeed, this repeated phrase, “Show them” (which comes up three times in the poem, through anaphora), serves to reassert this message (quite forcefully, given its recurrence and the imperative verb): that a parent’s role is to “Show”, or reveal the innate ‘aliveness’ of the world, as per the title. It is not to impose anything that looks like pressure.

The entire poem’s conceptualisation of what ‘good parenting’ looks like for the speaker hinges upon a single word in the fifth line, a structural hinge serving as a directional change. When the speaker uses the adverb “instead”, a volta is created – though this has been foreshadowed by the conjunction “but” of the previous line. The parental preconception of encouraging “extraordinary lives”, which has been dismissed as “admirable [though] foolish[...]”, is shattered by this change of direction, which allows parental “foolishness” to metamorphose into childhood experiences of “wonder”, “marvel”, “joy”, and “pleasure”. It is this structural feature that allows the speaker to express the so-called ‘better’ way of parenting, thereby converting the negative abstract nouns into those positive ones. The speaker’s message has been rendered clear by the poet throughout by these features, even before the final line’s more explicit assertion of how it works in the isolated, lone sentence.