AQA GCSE English Literature: Unseen Poetry: Compare Methods of Two Poems (8 marks)

Poem A is Frost Fair by the (fictional) poet Harriet Vane.

The garden has been silvered overnight. Each blade of grass stands stiff in its own glove of frost, and the small pond, that yesterday slapped at its banks, lies hammered into glass.

The world has stopped to let the cold pass through. My breath goes out ahead of me in clouds, the only moving thing. A blackbird lands, then thinks again, and lifts, and leaves no print.

I love this hour, this held and brittle hush, before the sun comes up and melts it all to ordinary wet. For now the cold has made the garden perfect, still, and mine.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

Poem B is School Run, January by the (fictional) poet Greg Mallon.

The car won't start. The windscreen is a sheet of frost I have to scrape with a credit card while the kids complain and the engine grinds and my fingers go from aching to plain numb.

The cold is not romantic at half eight. It is a tax. It is the bus we miss, the gritless hill, the queue of brake lights, breath fogging the glass so I can't see the road.

I scrape a porthole just the size of sense and crawl to school behind a council truck, and curse the pretty frost that some fool poet no doubt is, somewhere warm, calling a gift.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

In both Frost Fair and School Run, January the poets describe a frosty winter morning. Compare the methods the two poets use to present their very different attitudes to the cold. (8 marks)

Poem A is Spring Tide by the (fictional) poet Marina Cole.

The sea today is in a giving mood. It lays its gifts along the morning sand: a green glass bead, a cuttlefish, a rope worn soft as hair, a crab's abandoned house.

It comes up gently, hardly seems to move, and yet each time I look the line has crept a little nearer, patient as a tide that has all day, all year, all time to spend.

I walk its edge and let it touch my feet, cold, then familiar, like an old hello. The sea has done this since before the town, and will go on long after, giving, taking.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

Poem B is Storm, Off the Point by the (fictional) poet Yusuf Hara.

Tonight the sea has lost its temper wholly. It throws itself against the harbour wall and screams back white, then gathers, and again hurls all its weight at stone that will not move.

There is no edge to walk. The spray comes over the road, the railings, the shut and shaking doors. The boats inside the harbour buck and strain against their ropes like animals that smell fire.

I watch from glass. The sea I thought I knew, that lapped my childhood summers warm and slow, has shown the other face it always had, and would have shown me, given half a chance.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

In both Spring Tide and Storm, Off the Point the poets describe the sea. Compare the methods the two poets use to present the sea's character. (8 marks)

Poem A is Saturday Market by the (fictional) poet Bea Olsen.

The whole street is a single open mouth of noise and colour. Trestle tables groan with oranges in pyramids, with cheese, with bolts of cloth a woman holds to light.

A man sells fish and sings the prices out in one long shout that nobody finds strange. Someone's small dog is barking at a balloon. The smells arrive in waves: bread, then warm tar,

then flowers, then fried onions, then again the sea-salt tang of ice and silver fish. I move with the crowd and let it carry me, a single drop inside a happy river.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

Poem B is The Street at Three a.m. by the (fictional) poet Karl Devine.

The same street, emptied. Now the only light is one cracked lamp that hums above the bank. A single page of newspaper lifts up, turns over twice, and settles like a moth.

The shop fronts hold their breath behind the grilles. My footsteps are too loud. They follow me, bounce off the shut-up windows, double back, until I almost turn to see who's there.

A fox sits in the doorway of the bank and looks at me as if I am the stranger. The street I knew by day does not know me. It keeps its own dark business, and I pass.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

In both Saturday Market and The Street at Three a.m. the poets describe the same street. Compare the methods the two poets use to present the atmosphere of the street. (8 marks)

Poem A is The House We Grew Up In by the (fictional) poet Faye Ridley.

They have repainted it a stranger's colour. The hedge I used to hide in has been grubbed to gravel, and the gate that always stuck swings open now without a word of fuss.

I stand across the road and let it look at me. Behind that glass I learned to read, and lied, and watched the rain for hours, and was small. None of that shows. The house has let me go.

It wears new curtains like a borrowed face, polite and blank. It does not know my name. I had thought a place could keep a person in it. It can't. It only keeps the next one warm.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

Poem B is Demolition by the (fictional) poet Owen Trask.

They took the roof off first, and for a day the house stood open to the sky like something operated on, its rooms shown rude and bare, the bedroom's cheerful paper out in rain.

You could see the stairs that led to nothing now, the square of brighter wall a clock had guarded, the small dark mouth where once a fire had been. A house turned inside out has no more secrets.

Then the machine came in and made it rubble in a single afternoon, and trucked it off, and left a flat brown space, and by the spring the grass had closed it over, like a wound.

(This poem was written for this exercise.)

In both The House We Grew Up In and Demolition the poets describe returning to or losing a former home. Compare the methods the two poets use to present feelings about the loss of a home. (8 marks)