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This final lesson draws together the threads of the entire anthology, examining how attitudes to love, desire, gender, sexuality, and marriage evolve across five centuries — from Wyatt's Tudor court to Dowson's fin-de-siècle despair. The aim is to equip you with the comparative frameworks and analytical strategies you need for Paper 1, Section C of the AQA A-Level English Literature exam, where you will be asked to compare poems from the anthology in response to a thematic question.
Before examining themes, it is worth reminding ourselves what the examiners are looking for:
| AO | What It Means | How to Hit It |
|---|---|---|
| AO1 | Informed personal response, using literary terminology | Develop your own argument; use precise technical vocabulary (enjambment, volta, caesura, conceit, etc.) |
| AO2 | Analyse language, form, and structure | Close-read specific words and phrases; explain how form contributes to meaning |
| AO3 | Contextual understanding | Show how historical, social, literary, and biographical contexts shape meaning |
| AO4 | Connections across texts | Explicitly compare poems — do not write two separate essays stapled together |
| AO5 | Different interpretations | Engage with critical perspectives; offer alternative readings |
One of the anthology's central preoccupations is the question: what is love? The answers vary enormously across the five centuries.
In "Whoso List to Hunt," love is a chase — the lover pursues the beloved as a hunter pursues a deer. But the chase is futile: the hind belongs to "Caesar," and the speaker is "of them that farthest cometh behind." Love is defined by its impossibility; the desire is real but the object is unattainable.
Sonnet 116 attempts to fix love as an unchanging constant — "an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken." Love is not a feeling but a metaphysical principle, existing beyond time and change. Yet the poem's accumulation of negatives ("not," "never," "nor no") may betray an anxiety that this definition is aspirational rather than descriptive.
For the metaphysical and carpe diem poets, love is inseparable from rhetoric. Donne's "The Flea" and Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" present love (or at least desire) as something to be argued for — a proposition requiring evidence and logical structure. Love becomes a performance of wit.
The libertine poets split on whether sexual love is a form of freedom or a form of bondage. Lovelace's "The Scrutiny" presents infidelity as cheerful liberty; Rochester's "Absent from Thee" presents it as a curse — the speaker cannot stop himself from straying, even though straying destroys him.
"The Garden of Love" defines love negatively — by what institutions (the Church, social convention) do to destroy it. Love is natural, joyful, and free; religion binds it with "briars." Blake's love is defined by its enemies.
For Burns, Rossetti, and Hardy, love is inseparable from loss. "Ae Fond Kiss" mourns a parting; "Remember" anticipates death; "At an Inn" laments a love that can never be consummated. In each case, love is defined by what it lacks — presence, continuation, fulfilment.
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" and Dowson's "Cynara" poem present love as an enchantment from which the speaker cannot escape. The beloved becomes an inescapable presence — haunting the knight on his cold hillside, falling as a shadow between Dowson's speaker and his temporary lovers.
The anthology spans a period of enormous change in gender relations, but certain patterns recur.
In most of the anthology's poems, men look and women are looked at. Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" is the clearest example: the woman is entirely an object of contemplation, described but never heard. Wyatt's hind is a creature to be hunted. Keats's Belle Dame is seen, touched, and interpreted but never speaks in a language the knight can understand.
Rossetti's "Remember" is the anthology's most powerful assertion of female agency within the sonnet tradition. The dying woman controls the terms of her own remembrance and, in the volta, demonstrates a selflessness that challenges the male tradition of possessive love.
Hardy's "'Melia" in "The Ruined Maid" is given voice within a dialogue, and her sharp, ironic responses expose the hypocrisy of the moral code that has "ruined" her.
The anthology is haunted by the sexual double standard: men are praised (or at least tolerated) for sexual experience; women are destroyed by it. Lovelace's speaker cheerfully plans to "love my round" and return; the woman is expected to wait faithfully. Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" exposes this standard with savage irony. Rochester acknowledges his own double standard but cannot escape it.
There is a broadly traceable movement across the anthology:
| Period | Attitude |
|---|---|
| Tudor/Elizabethan | Women as objects of desire — idealised (Shakespeare) or pursued (Wyatt) |
| 17th century | Women as targets of persuasion (Donne, Marvell) or expected to tolerate male infidelity (Lovelace) |
| Romantic | Women as symbols — of nature (Blake), of beauty (Byron), of dangerous otherness (Keats) |
| Victorian | Women beginning to speak — Rossetti seizes the sonnet; Hardy gives voice to the "ruined" woman |
| Decadent | Women as absent obsessions — Dowson's Cynara is a memory, not a presence |
The anthology explores a persistent tension between the physical and the spiritual dimensions of love.
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