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
- Eat Me by Patience Agbabi
- Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass by Simon Armitage
- Material by Ros Barber
- History by John Burnside
- An Easy Passage by Julia Copus
- The Deliverer by Tishani Doshi
- The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig
- To My Nine-Year-Old Self by Helen Dunmore
- A Minor Role by U.A. Fanthorpe
- The Gun by Vicki Feaver
- The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled by Leontia Flynn
- Giuseppe by Roderick Ford
- Out of the Bag by Seamus Heaney
- Effects by Alan Jenkins
- Genetics by Sinéad Morrissey
- From the Journal of a Disappointed Man by Andrew Motion
- Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra
- Please Hold by Ciaran O’Driscoll
- On Her Blindness by Adam Thorpe
- Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn by Tim Turnbull
Pre-1900 – The Medieval Period
- Noah’s Flood (Chester) Anon 33 by Amal Dunqul
- The Second Shepherds’ Pageant (Wakefield)
- The Crucifixion (York)
- Noah (Chester) Anon
- The Second Shepherds’ Play
- The Crucifixion
- The Wife of Bath’s Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer
- 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
- The Flea
- The Good Morrow
- Song (‘Go and catch a falling star’)
- Woman’s Constancy
- The Sun Rising
- A Valediction of Weeping
- A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day
- The Apparition
- Elegy: To his Mistress Going to Bed
- At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
- Batter My Heart
- A Hymn to God the Father
- The Canonization
- Song (‘Sweetest love I do not go’)
- Air and Angels
- The Anniversary
- Twickenham Garden
- Love’s Growth
- Love’s Alchemy
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- The Ecstasy
- The Funeral
- The Relic
- Holy Sonnet I (‘Thou hast made me’)
- Holy Sonnet V (‘I am a little world’)
- Holy Sonnet VI (‘This is my play’s last scene’)
- Holy Sonnet VII (‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’)
- Holy Sonnet X (‘Death be not proud’)
- Holy Sonnet XI (‘Spit in my face, you Jews’)
- Holy Sonnet XIV (‘Batter my heart’)
- Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward
- Hymn to God my God, in My Sickness
- A Hymn to God the Father
George Herbert
Thomas Carew
- To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side: An Eddy
- To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her
- A Song (‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows’)
Anne Bradstreet
Richard Lovelace
Andrew Marvell
Henry Vaughan
Katherine Philips
Pre-1900 – The Romantic Period
William Blake
William Wordsworth
- Lines Written in Early Spring
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
- Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Lord Byron
- Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull
- So We’ll Go no more A Roving
- On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- The cold earth slept below
- Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples
- Ode to the West Wind
- The Question
John Keats
- Sonnet: On the Sea
- O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell
- On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
- In drear-nighted December
- On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
- When I have fears that I may cease to be
- To Sleep
- Ode to Psyche
- Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Ode to a Nightingale
- Ode on Melancholy
- Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art
- To Autumn
- The Eve of St Agnes
Pre-1900 – The Victorian Period
Alfred Tennyson
- From In Memoriam: VII ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’
- From In Memoriam: XCV ‘By night we linger’d on the lawn’
- From Maud: I.xi ‘O let the solid ground’
- From Maud: I.xviii ‘I have led her home, my love, my only friend’
- From Maud: I.xxii ‘Come into the garden, Maud’
- From Maud: II.iv ‘O that ’twere possible’
Emily Brontë
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Grief
- From Sonnets from the Portuguese XXIV ‘Let the world’s sharpness, like a closing knife’
- The Best Thing in the World
Robert Browning
Charlotte Brontë
- The Autumn day its course has run–the Autumn evening falls’
- The house was still–the room was still
- ‘I now had only to retrace’
- ‘The Nurse believed the sick man slept’
- Stanzas – [‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning’] (perhaps by Emily Brontë)
Christina Rossetti
- Remember
- Echo
- May
- A Birthday
- Somewhere or Other
- Some ladies dress in muslin full and white
- The World
- An Apple-Gathering
- Maude Clare
- At Home
- Up-Hill
- Goblin Market
- What Would I Give?
- Twice
- Memory
- A Christmas Carol
- Passing and Glassing
- Piteous my rhyme is
- A Helpmeet for Him
- As froth on the face of the deep
- Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful
- Babylon the Great
Thomas Hardy
Post-1900 – The Modernist Period
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
- The Red Wheelbarrow
- This is just to say
- Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
- The Hunters in the Snow
- The Great Figure
D.H. Lawrence
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
E.E. Cummings
W.H. Auden
T.S. Eliot
- Portrait of a Lady
- Preludes
- Rhapsody on a Windy Night
- Gerontion
- Sweeney Erect
- Whispers of Immortality
- The Waste Land
- I. The Burial of the Dead
- II. A Game of Chess
- III. The Fire Sermon
- IV. Death by Water
- V. What the Thunder said
- The Hollow Men
- Ash-Wednesday
- Ariel Poems: Journey of the Magi (1927)
Post-1900 – The Movement
Thomas Blackburn
- Hospital for Defectives
- Felo De Se
- Horror Comic Robert Conquest
- Man and Woman
Philip Larkin
John Wain
- Apology for Understatement
- Au Jardin des Plantes
- A Song about Major Eatherly
- Brooklyn Heights
Elizabeth Jennings
Molly Holden
Peter Porter
- Metamorphosis
- London is full of chickens on electric spit
- Your Attention Please
Jenny Joseph
George Macbeth
- The Miner’s Helmet
- The Wasps’ Nest
- When I am Dead
Rosemary Tonks
- Story of a Hotel Room by Rosemary Tonks
- Farewell to Kurdistan by Rosemary Tonks
Philip Larkin
- Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album
- Wedding-Wind
- Places, Loved Ones
- Coming
- Reasons for Attendance
- Dry-Point
- Next, Please
- Going
- Wants
- Maiden Name
- Born Yesterday
- Whatever Happened?
- No Road
- Wires
- Church Going
- Age
- Myxomatosis
- Toads
- Poetry Of Departures
- Triple Time
- Spring
- Deceptions
- I Remember, I Remember
- Absences
- Latest Face by Philip Larkin
- If, My Darling
- Skin
- Arrivals, Departures
- At Grass