Edexcel A Level (9ET0) English Literature

For those who are studying English Literature at A level on the Pearson Edexcel board of examiners, here is a list of the required poems analyzed. This includes all the selected poems, mentioned in the Edexcel specification for the syllabus.

Please feel free to skip to the poem most relevant to you. If you want a poem to be analyzed that you cannot find on the site too, please feel free to contact us.

Edexcel A Level (9ET0) English Literature

Post-2000 Specified Poetry

1. Eat Me by Patience Agbabi ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass by Simon Armitage ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Material by Ros Barber ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. History by John Burnside ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. An Easy Passage by Julia Copus ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. The Deliverer by Tishani Doshi ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. To My Nine-Year-Old Self by Helen Dunmore ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. A Minor Role by U.A. Fanthorpe ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. The Gun by Vicki Feaver ^{[PDF Guide]}
11. The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled by Leontia Flynn ^{[PDF Guide]}
12. Giuseppe by Roderick Ford ^{[PDF Guide]}
13. Out of the Bag by Seamus Heaney ^{[PDF Guide]}
14. Effects by Alan Jenkins ^{[PDF Guide]}
15. Genetics by Sinéad Morrissey ^{[PDF Guide]}
16. From the Journal of a Disappointed Man by Andrew Motion ^{[PDF Guide]}
17. Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra ^{[PDF Guide]}
18. Please Hold by Ciaran O’Driscoll ^{[PDF Guide]}
19. On Her Blindness by Adam Thorpe ^{[PDF Guide]}
20. Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn by Tim Turnbull ^{[PDF Guide]}

Pre-1900 – The Medieval Period

1. Noah’s Flood (Chester) Anon 33 by Amal Dunqul ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Second Shepherds’ Pageant (Wakefield)
3. The Crucifixion (York)
4. Noah (Chester) Anon
5. The Second Shepherds’ Play
6. The Crucifixion
7. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer
8. The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

Note for a prescribed list of poems for medieval poetry:

• Noah’s Flood/Noah is counted as the equivalent of seven poems
• The Second Shepherds’ Pageant/Play is counted as the equivalent of seventeen poems
• The Crucifixion is counted as the equivalent of six poems.
• The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is counted as the equivalent of twenty poems
• The Wife of Bath’s Tale is counted as the equivalent of ten poems

Pre-1900 – Metaphysical Poetry

John Donne ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. The Flea ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Good Morrow ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Song (‘Go and catch a falling star’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Woman’s Constancy ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. The Sun Rising ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. A Valediction of Weeping ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. The Apparition ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. Elegy: To his Mistress Going to Bed ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners ^{[PDF Guide]}
11. Batter My Heart ^{[PDF Guide]}
12. A Hymn to God the Father ^{[PDF Guide]}
13. The Canonization ^{[PDF Guide]}
14. Song (‘Sweetest love I do not go’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
15. Air and Angels ^{[PDF Guide]}
16. The Anniversary ^{[PDF Guide]}
17. Twickenham Garden ^{[PDF Guide]}
18. Love’s Growth ^{[PDF Guide]}
19. Love’s Alchemy ^{[PDF Guide]}
20. A Valediction Forbidding Mourning ^{[PDF Guide]}
21. The Ecstasy ^{[PDF Guide]}
22. The Funeral ^{[PDF Guide]}
23. The Relic ^{[PDF Guide]}
24. Holy Sonnet I (‘Thou hast made me’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
25. Holy Sonnet V (‘I am a little world’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
26. Holy Sonnet VI (‘This is my play’s last scene’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
27. Holy Sonnet VII (‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
28. Holy Sonnet X (‘Death be not proud’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
29. Holy Sonnet XI (‘Spit in my face, you Jews’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
30. Holy Sonnet XIV (‘Batter my heart’) ^{[PDF Guide]}
31. Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward ^{[PDF Guide]}
32. Hymn to God my God, in My Sickness ^{[PDF Guide]}
33. A Hymn to God the Father ^{[PDF Guide]}

George Herbert

1. Redemption ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Collar ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. The Pulley ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Love III ^{[PDF Guide]}

Thomas Carew

1. To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side: An Eddy ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. A Song (‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows’) ^{[PDF Guide]}

Anne Bradstreet

1. A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Engagement ^{[PDF Guide]}

Richard Lovelace

1. Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars ^{[PDF Guide]}

Andrew Marvell

1. The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. To His Coy Mistress ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. The Definition of Love ^{[PDF Guide]}

Henry Vaughan

1. Unprofitableness ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The World ^{[PDF Guide]}

Katherine Philips

1. To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. A Dialogue of Friendship Multiplied ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Orinda to Lucasia ^{[PDF Guide]}

Pre-1900 – The Romantic Period

William Blake ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Holy Thursday ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Sick Rose ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. The Tyger ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. London ^{[PDF Guide]}

William Wordsworth ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Lines Written in Early Spring ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Ode: Intimations of Immortality ^{[PDF Guide]}

Lord Byron ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. So We’ll Go no more A Roving ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year ^{[PDF Guide]}

Percy Bysshe Shelley ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. The cold earth slept below ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Ode to the West Wind ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. The Question ^{[PDF Guide]}

John Keats ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Sonnet: On the Sea ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. In drear-nighted December ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. When I have fears that I may cease to be ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. To Sleep ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. Ode to Psyche ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. Ode on a Grecian Urn ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. Ode to a Nightingale ^{[PDF Guide]}
11. Ode on Melancholy ^{[PDF Guide]}
12. Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art ^{[PDF Guide]}
13. To Autumn ^{[PDF Guide]}
14. The Eve of St Agnes ^{[PDF Guide]}

Pre-1900 – The Victorian Period

Alfred Tennyson ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. From In Memoriam: VII ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. From In Memoriam: XCV ‘By night we linger’d on the lawn’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. From Maud: I.xi ‘O let the solid ground’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. From Maud: I.xviii ‘I have led her home, my love, my only friend’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. From Maud: I.xxii ‘Come into the garden, Maud’
6. From Maud: II.iv ‘O that ’twere possible’ ^{[PDF Guide]}

Emily Brontë ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. The Visionary ^{[PDF Guide]}

Elizabeth Barrett Browning ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Grief ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. From Sonnets from the Portuguese XXIV ‘Let the world’s sharpness, like a closing knife’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. The Best Thing in the World ^{[PDF Guide]}

Robert Browning ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. ‘Died…’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. My Last Duchess ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Home-Thoughts, from Abroad ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Meeting at Night ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. Love in a Life ^{[PDF Guide]}

Charlotte Brontë

1. The Autumn day its course has run–the Autumn evening falls’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The house was still–the room was still ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. ‘I now had only to retrace’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. ‘The Nurse believed the sick man slept’ ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. Stanzas – [‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning’] (perhaps by Emily Brontë) ^{[PDF Guide]}

Christina Rossetti ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Remember ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Echo ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. May ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. A Birthday ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. Somewhere or Other
6. Some ladies dress in muslin full and white ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. The World ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. An Apple-Gathering ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. Maude Clare ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. At Home ^{[PDF Guide]}
11. Up-Hill ^{[PDF Guide]}
12. Goblin Market ^{[PDF Guide]}
13. What Would I Give? ^{[PDF Guide]}
14. Twice ^{[PDF Guide]}
15. Memory ^{[PDF Guide]}
16. A Christmas Carol
17. Passing and Glassing ^{[PDF Guide]}
18. Piteous my rhyme is ^{[PDF Guide]}
19. A Helpmeet for Him ^{[PDF Guide]}
20. As froth on the face of the deep ^{[PDF Guide]}
21. Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful ^{[PDF Guide]}
22. Babylon the Great ^{[PDF Guide]}

Thomas Hardy ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. At an Inn ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. I Look into My Glass ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Drummer Hodge ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. A Wife in London ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. The Darkling Thrush ^{[PDF Guide]}

Post-1900 – The Modernist Period

Robert Frost ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. The Runaway ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Mending Wall ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Mowing ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. The Road Not Taken ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. Out, Out ^{[PDF Guide]}

William Carlos Williams

1. The Red Wheelbarrow ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. This is just to say ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. The Hunters in the Snow ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. The Great Figure ^{[PDF Guide]}

D.H. Lawrence

1. Snake ^{[PDF Guide]}

Marianne Moore

1. To a Snail ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. What Are Years? ^{[PDF Guide]}

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1. Time does not bring relief; you all have lied… ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Recuerdo ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Wild Swans ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. The Fawn ^{[PDF Guide]}

E.E. Cummings

1. in Just ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. what if a much of a which of a wind ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. pity this busy monster, manunkind ^{[PDF Guide]}

W.H. Auden ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Funeral Blues (Stop all the Clocks) ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Lullaby ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Musée des Beaux Arts ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. The Shield of Achilles ^{[PDF Guide]}

T.S. Eliot ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. La Figlia Che Piange ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Love Song of by J. Alfred Prufrock ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Portrait of a Lady ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Preludes ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. Rhapsody on a Windy Night ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. Gerontion ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. Sweeney Erect ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. Whispers of Immortality ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. The Waste Land ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. I. The Burial of the Dead
11. II. A Game of Chess
12. III. The Fire Sermon
13. IV. Death by Water
14. V. What the Thunder said
15. The Hollow Men ^{[PDF Guide]}
16. Ash-Wednesday ^{[PDF Guide]}
17. Ariel Poems: Journey of the Magi (1927) ^{[PDF Guide]}

Post-1900 – The Movement

Thomas Blackburn

1. Hospital for Defectives ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Felo De Se ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Horror Comic Robert Conquest
4. Man and Woman

John Wain

1. Apology for Understatement ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Au Jardin des Plantes ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. A Song about Major Eatherly
4. Brooklyn Heights ^{[PDF Guide]}

Elizabeth Jennings

1. Delay ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Song at the Beginning of Autumn ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Answers ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. The Young Ones ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. One Flesh ^{[PDF Guide]}

Molly Holden

1. Photograph of Haymaker, 1890 ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. Giant Decorative Dahlias ^{[PDF Guide]}

Peter Porter

1. Metamorphosis
2. London is full of chickens on electric spit
3. Your Attention Please ^{[PDF Guide]}

Jenny Joseph

1. Warning ^{[PDF Guide]}

George Macbeth

1. The Miner’s Helmet ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. The Wasps’ Nest
3. When I am Dead

Rosemary Tonks

1. Story of a Hotel Room ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Farewell to Kurdistan ^{[PDF Guide]}

Philip Larkin ^{[PDF Guide]}

1. Toads ^{[PDF Guide]}
2. Coming ^{[PDF Guide]}
3. At Grass ^{[PDF Guide]}
4. Take One Home for the Kiddies ^{[PDF Guide]}
5. Nothing to be Said ^{[PDF Guide]}
6. The Whitsun Weddings ^{[PDF Guide]}
7. Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album ^{[PDF Guide]}
8. Wedding-Wind ^{[PDF Guide]}
9. Places, Loved Ones ^{[PDF Guide]}
10. Coming ^{[PDF Guide]}
11. Reasons for Attendance ^{[PDF Guide]}
12. Dry-Point ^{[PDF Guide]}
13. Next, Please ^{[PDF Guide]}
14. Going ^{[PDF Guide]}
15. Wants ^{[PDF Guide]}
16. Maiden Name ^{[PDF Guide]}
17. Born Yesterday ^{[PDF Guide]}
18. Whatever Happened? ^{[PDF Guide]}
19. No Road ^{[PDF Guide]}
20. Wires ^{[PDF Guide]}
21. Church Going ^{[PDF Guide]}
22. Age ^{[PDF Guide]}
23. Myxomatosis ^{[PDF Guide]}
24. Toads ^{[PDF Guide]}
25. Poetry Of Departures ^{[PDF Guide]}
26. Triple Time ^{[PDF Guide]}
27. Spring ^{[PDF Guide]}
28. Deceptions ^{[PDF Guide]}
29. I Remember, I Remember ^{[PDF Guide]}
30. Absences ^{[PDF Guide]}
31. Latest Face
32. If, My Darling ^{[PDF Guide]}
33. Skin ^{[PDF Guide]}
34. Arrivals, Departures ^{[PDF Guide]}
35. At Grass ^{[PDF Guide]}