Poetry Anthologies from Educational Syllabuses

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

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Will created Poem Analysis back in 2015 and has a team of the best poetry experts helping him analyze poems from the past and present. Although he has a background in Automotive Engineering, having worked for McLaren testing supercars, Will has a keen eye for poetry and literature.
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