There are fifteen poems in the GCSE Love and Relationships anthology.

For your exam, you will be given one poem in full, printed on the page, and you will be asked to compare this poem to another from the anthology.

All of the GCSE English Literature course is closed-book, meaning that you will need to learn at least three lines from each poem.

It is possible to get top marks for this question by making sure that you know the following:

• What the poem is about

• What the poem means

• The methods the poet uses to convey their message

• The links between the ideas of other poems in the anthology

Synopsis

This section includes:

• A general overview of the poem

• A detailed look at the poem line-by-line

• Analysis of the poem, giving Cecil Day Lewis’ intention and message

A General Overview of the Poem

Walking Away, by former Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, reflects on the growing separation between parent and child over time. This autobiographical poem captures the emotional pain of letting go, portraying it as a natural and inevitable part of life and relationships.

Line-by-Line

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The poem opens with a focus on time – particularly the way time passes.

We move into the realm of memory.

The speaker remembers a day eighteen years ago – a symbolic number as eighteen is when a person becomes an adult.

There is natural imagery, focusing on the autumnal day.

A tone of nostalgia is created.

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

The focus is a day, in the past, when the speaker watched their child play football.

The use of the hyphen implies a break in thought – implying an emotional resonance.

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

The speaker focuses on a painful moment as their child leaves to go to school.

This separation is rendered in the metaphor ‘wrenched from its orbit’ – comparing the child to a satellite pulled away from its orbit.

This is a vivid description of a child leaving, conveying the clear sense of loss the parent feels.

The poet explores the dependent relationship of parent and child, and how the change in this relationship can be painful.

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

The speaker focuses on the child being unprepared to leave.

The child walks, but he is nervous and is unsure of which direction to take.

The use of natural imagery reflects the natural conclusion of the parent/child relationship – that they must part.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

The speaker continues to focus on the anxiousness of the child.

The use of the simile ‘like a winged seed…’ continues the natural imagery of the poem, furthering the comparisons with nature in order to show how the emotions both child and parent feel are, themselves, natural.

The child is on the cusp of a new life – and this is conveyed with this simile.

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

The speaker reflects on the confusion they feel about the give-and-take that is a necessary part of growing up (both parent and child).

The power of nature is acknowledged – pain must sometimes occur in order to strengthen us, as with ‘fire’ and ‘clay’.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

The speaker explains that they had ‘worse partings’ than the day the child went to school – but that this was particularly poignant.

The use of the verb ‘gnaws’ showcases this pain and intense feeling.

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

The poem ends with a shift in focus to religious imagery – the belief in God and nature are involved in this process.

The speaker explains that the foundation of parental love is ‘letting go’ of your children.

Painful separations in live build our resilience as people.

Writer’s Methods

This section aims to support your revision by providing you with concrete and clear examples of methods that Cecil Day-Lewis uses.

Remember: methods support meaning, not the other way round. You will gain more marks focusing your essays on the big ideas of the poems and then supporting these ideas with the methods that the writer uses.

Form

Walking Away is written from the first-person perspective of a parent recalling the moment they watched their child leave for school: “I can see you walking away.”

Cecil Day-Lewis employs an intimate monologue to express the parent’s emotions, reflecting on parental love and the increasing distance in family relationships. The speaker directly addresses their child—“since I watched you play / Your first game of football”—yet the child remains silent, emphasizing the growing separation between them.

The poem follows a structured ABACA rhyme scheme, mirroring the parent's composed tone as they reflect on this poignant memory. This regularity suggests a sense of control, possibly conveying the parent’s stoic acceptance of the painful reality.

Through this personal reflection, Day-Lewis captures the emotional complexities of letting go, presenting the poem as a sentimental yet contemplative conversation between parent and child.

Structure

The poem is structured into four quintets, mirroring the speaker’s continuous flow of thoughts as they reflect on the evolving parent-child relationship. Initially, a present-day event triggers the memory, but as the reflection deepens, the speaker recalls other moments of separation. Ultimately, the poem concludes with a sense of acceptance, recognizing the natural and positive aspects of this process.

Language

Cecil Day-Lewis blends violent and natural imagery to capture the parent's emotional turmoil as their child moves toward independence. This contrast highlights both the pain and uncertainty of letting go, while also reinforcing the speaker’s recognition of separation as a natural and inevitable aspect of parenthood.

Cecil Day-Lewis employs natural imagery to enhance the vividness of memory and the emotions tied to separation. The speaker recalls “a sunny day with the leaves just turning,” using autumn as a symbol of nostalgia and transition. While the changing seasons reflect natural growth and development for both parent and child, they also suggest an ending, as implied in “the leaves just turning.”

The moment of separation is further intensified through violent imagery, as the child is compared to a satellite “wrenched” from its orbit. The verb “wrenched” conveys a sudden and forceful detachment, underscoring the parent's unpreparedness for this emotional shift. The present-tense verb “gnaws” later reinforces the lingering pain of the experience, emphasizing its lasting impact. Through this simile, Day-Lewis portrays separation as painful and unfamiliar, evoking distress and confusion for the parent.

However, while the experience is depicted as painful, the child is described using gentle natural imagery. The speaker likens them to a “winged seed loosened from its parent stem” and a “half-fledged thing.” These images of a baby bird and a drifting seed highlight the child’s vulnerability, yet they also symbolize the natural process of growing up and leaving the safety of home.

The poem repeatedly emphasizes separation through the word “away,” as the child “walks away,” “drifts away,” and “eddies away.” This idea culminates in the poem’s final lines:

“How selfhood begins with a walking away, / And love is proved in the letting go.”

Here, Day-Lewis suggests that while separation may be painful and inevitable in family relationships, it ultimately strengthens the bond between parent and child, proving love through the act of letting go.

Context

At MyEdSpace, we use this analogy to discuss context – ketchup, salt and chips.

If you ordered a portion of chips, and asked for salt, you wouldn’t then dump the salt into the corner of your chips and start dipping each individual chip into the salt.

When you put salt on your chips, you sprinkle it over, sparingly, so as to give a good coverage of salt across the chips as a whole. Context is just like salt on chips.

Context is not ketchup – because it would be appropriate to squeeze ketchup into the corner of your plate and dip each chip in (and in fact, that is advised).

So when you’re including contextual information in your essays, sprinkle it across the essay, just like you sprinkle salt on your chips.

Let’s link the context to the key ideas and themes of the poem.

Family Relationships

"Walking Away" was written in 1962 and features in Cecil Day-Lewis’ poetry collection, The Gate. It is dedicated to his son, Sean, and reflects on his first day at school.

Told from a first-person perspective, the poem has a deeply personal tone as the parent silently addresses their child, recalling a painful memory of separation. However, Day-Lewis himself has stated that the poem speaks to all parents, capturing a universal experience and highlighting the timeless nature of familial love.

Although written in the 1960s, Walking Away is influenced by the Romantic tradition, which explores profound emotions and personal reflection. Day-Lewis, particularly inspired by Wordsworth, incorporated Romantic elements into his work, evident in the poem’s use of simple yet powerful natural imagery to convey complex emotions. This emphasis on nature and deep personal sentiment aligns Walking Away with the Romantic ideals that shaped much of his early poetry.

Distance

The themes of Walking Away center on the relationship between parent and child, focusing particularly on the inevitable process of separation.

Cecil Day-Lewis may have drawn from his own childhood experiences, having lost his mother at a young age and becoming emotionally distant from his father. The poem explores this natural yet painful transition, portraying it as an essential part of growth and independence.

Despite its complex themes, Walking Away is written in a simple and melodic form, characteristic of lyrical poetry. Its regular rhyme scheme reflects this tradition, reinforcing a sense of rhythm and control amidst the emotional depth.

Day-Lewis was part of an influential literary circle where he encountered celebrated poets such as W.H. Auden, who also wrote in this style. The poem’s use of straightforward imagery, despite the weight of its emotions, aligns with the conventions of lyrical poetry, which seeks to express feelings in their purest and most resonant form.

Comparison

You are required to write an essay in your exam that is a comparison of the ideas and themes explored in two poems from the Love and Relationships anthology. Therefore, it is very important to revise the poems in pairs and to enter the exam with an idea of what poem you will choose to compare once you know what the named poem is.

‘Climbing My Grandfather’ and ‘Mother, Any Distance’

This poem serves as an effective comparison for exploring family relationships, particularly the emotional distance between parent and child as part of growing up. While Walking Away is written from the perspective of a father, Mother, Any Distance offers the child’s point of view, providing a contrasting insight into the experience of separation.

Similarities:

Both poems explore children growing up and leaving home, creating distance between parent and child.

Day-Lewis uses the first-person perspective to express a father's personal thoughts and emotions as he reflects on moments of separation while his child grows up, creating a sentimental tone: “Your first game of football.”

To convey the pain and unfamiliarity of this experience, he employs a simile with space imagery: “like a satellite / Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away.” Similarly, Armitage also uses first-person narration to present the intimate emotions of a child leaving home, emphasizing their sense of strangeness: “I space-walk through the empty bedrooms.”

Day-Lewis incorporates metaphorical language to highlight the child’s vulnerability in the process of letting go: “a half-fledged thing set free / Into a wilderness.” Likewise, Armitage symbolically contrasts an anchor—representing the security of home—with a kite, a fragile object at the mercy of the wind, to illustrate the child’s uncertain independence.

Both poets use natural imagery to reflect on the evolving parent-child relationship. In Walking Away, the speaker describes the child’s departure using flight imagery: “That hesitant figure, eddying away / Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem.” Armitage similarly draws on nature, as the speaker anxiously looks toward “an endless sky”, mirroring a bird preparing for its first flight.

Differences:

The speaker in Walking Away accepts that separation is a natural part of family life, whereas the speaker in Mother, Any Distance does not reach similar acceptance.

Day-Lewis explores family relationships from the perspective of a father reflecting on moments with his son. The speaker uses direct address to mark the passage of time and recall a significant memory: “It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day —” / “since I watched you play.”

In contrast, Armitage’s poem is written from the perspective of a child addressing their mother in the present tense: “You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors.” This shift in perspective highlights the differing experiences of separation between parent and child.

Walking Away concludes with the speaker’s acceptance of independence and the necessity of letting go: “How selfhood begins with a walking away, / And love is proved in the letting go.”

However, Mother, Any Distance ends with a sense of uncertainty. The child remains unsure about the process of leaving home: “to fall or fly.” The parent’s fingers “still pinch,” suggesting a lingering attachment and hesitation.

While Day-Lewis ultimately portrays a parent’s acceptance of their child’s independence, Armitage captures the mutual uncertainty of both parent and child, leaving the resolution more open-ended.