Edexcel A Level (9ET0) English Literature

For those that 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 Appendix 5 of the GCE Level 3 Advanced Subsidiary in English Literature (9ET0). 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
2. Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass by Simon Armitage
3. Material by Ros Barber
4. History by John Burnside
5. An Easy Passage by Julia Copus
6. The Deliverer by Tishani Doshi
7. The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig
8. To My Nine-Year-Old Self by Helen Dunmore
9. A Minor Role by U.A. Fanthorpe
10. The Gun by Vicki Feaver
11. The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled by Leontia Flynn
12. Giuseppe by Roderick Ford
13. Out of the Bag by Seamus Heaney
14. Effects by Alan Jenkins
15. Genetics by Sinéad Morrissey
16. From the Journal of a Disappointed Man by Andrew Motion
17. Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra
18. Please Hold by Ciaran O’Driscoll
19. On Her Blindness by Adam Thorpe
20. Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn by Tim Turnbull

Pre-1900 – The Medieval Period

1. Noah’s Flood (Chester) Anon 33 by Amal Dunqul
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

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

George Herbert

1. Redemption
2. The Collar
3. The Pulley
4. Love III

Thomas Carew

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

Anne Bradstreet

1. A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Engagement

Richard Lovelace

1. Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Andrew Marvell

1. The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn
2. To His Coy Mistress
3. The Definition of Love

Henry Vaughan

1. Unprofitableness
2. The World

Katherine Philips

1. To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship
2. A Dialogue of Friendship Multiplied
3. Orinda to Lucasia

Pre-1900 – The Romantic Period

William Blake

1. Holy Thursday
2. The Sick Rose
3. The Tyger
4. London

William Wordsworth

1. Lines Written in Early Spring
2. Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
3. Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Lord Byron

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. The cold earth slept below
2. Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples
3. Ode to the West Wind
4. The Question

John Keats

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

Pre-1900 – The Victorian Period

Alfred Tennyson

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

Emily Brontë

1. The Visionary

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

1. Grief
2. From Sonnets from the Portuguese XXIV ‘Let the world’s sharpness, like a closing knife’
3. The Best Thing in the World

Robert Browning

1. ‘Died…’
2. My Last Duchess
3. Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
4. Meeting at Night
5. Love in a Life

Charlotte Brontë

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

Christina Rossetti

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

Thomas Hardy

1. At an Inn
2. I Look into My Glass
3. Drummer Hodge
4. A Wife in London
5. The Darkling Thrush

Post-1900 – The Modernist Period

Robert Frost

1. The Runaway
2. Mending Wall
3. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
4. Mowing
5. The Road Not Taken
6. Out, Out

William Carlos Williams

1. The Red Wheelbarrow
2. This is just to say
3. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
4. The Hunters in the Snow
5. The Great Figure

D.H. Lawrence

1. Snake

Marianne Moore

1. To a Snail
2. What Are Years?

T.S. Eliot

1. La Figlia Che Piange
2. The Love Song of by J. Alfred Prufrock

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1. Time does not bring relief; you all have lied…
2. Recuerdo
3. Wild Swans
4. The Fawn

E.E. Cummings

1. in Just
2. what if a much of a which of a wind
3. pity this busy monster, manunkind

W.H. Auden

1. Funeral Blues (Stop all the Clocks)
2. Lullaby
3. Musée des Beaux Arts
4. The Shield of Achilles

T.S. Eliot

1. Portrait of a Lady
2. Preludes
3. Rhapsody on a Windy Night
4. Gerontion
5. Sweeney Erect
6. Whispers of Immortality
7. The Waste Land
8. I. The Burial of the Dead
9. II. A Game of Chess
10. III. The Fire Sermon
11. IV. Death by Water
12. V. What the Thunder said
13. The Hollow Men
14. Ash-Wednesday
15. Ariel Poems: Journey of the Magi (1927)

Post-1900 – The Movement

Thomas Blackburn

1. Hospital for Defectives
2. Felo De Se
3. Horror Comic Robert Conquest
4. Man and Woman

Philip Larkin

1. Toads
2. Coming
3. At Grass
4. Take One Home for the Kiddies
5. Nothing to be Said
6. The Whitsun Weddings

John Wain

1. Apology for Understatement
2. Au Jardin des Plantes
3. A Song about Major Eatherly
4. Brooklyn Heights

Elizabeth Jennings

1. Delay
2. Song at the Beginning of Autumn
3. Answers
4. The Young Ones
5. One Flesh

Molly Holden

1. Photograph of Haymaker, 1890
2. Giant Decorative Dahlias

Peter Porter

1. Metamorphosis
2. London is full of chickens on electric spit
3. Your Attention Please

Jenny Joseph

1. Warning

George Macbeth

1. The Miner’s Helmet
2. The Wasps’ Nest
3. When I am Dead

Rosemary Tonks

1. Story of a Hotel Room by Rosemary Tonks
2. Farewell to Kurdistan by Rosemary Tonks

Philip Larkin

1. Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album
2. Wedding-Wind
3. Places, Loved Ones
4. Coming
5. Reasons for Attendance
6. Dry-Point
7. Next, Please
8. Going
9. Wants
10. Maiden Name
11. Born Yesterday
12. Whatever Happened?
13. No Road
14. Wires
15. Church Going
16. Age
17. Myxomatosis
18. Toads
19. Poetry Of Departures
20. Triple Time
21. Spring
22. Deceptions
23. I Remember, I Remember
24. Absences
25. Latest Face by Philip Larkin
26. If, My Darling
27. Skin
28. Arrivals, Departures
29. At Grass