A student shouldn’t try to attempt all these steps at once: they’ll need to re-read sections of the poem and backtrack a few times before they have a detailed annotation. I’d recommend colour-coding to ensure clarity. Here’s a copy of The Soldier by Rupert Brooke that I’ve annotated to give you an idea of the level of detail that a student should be aiming for.
Know the poems well
Well, first of all, it’s essential to know both poems really well. If you can’t write about one poem in detail, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to compare two. So, before you think about comparing poems, make sure that you have annotated the individual poems separately. If you’d like some tips on how to do this, just read this blog. A quick way of getting into a poem and making structured notes is to use the acronym FLIRTS (Form and structure, Language and sounds, Imagery, Rhyme, Rhythm and repetition, Theme and Tone, Speaker)
There’s more than one way of skinning a cat
Once you’re confident that you know both poems inside out and you have short, key quotations at the ready, it’s time to think about planning your comparison. Now, there is no one ‘correct’ way of planning. You don’t need a rigid essay framework to get the top marks.
Overly simplistic essay plans that deal with one poem at a time tend to get lower marks, as do plans which are artificial (the student rigidly sticks to alternating a similarity and then a difference). What you need to aim for is a plan that is led by your ideas and meaning, mood and message of the poem, and that incorporates analysis of writer’s methods. To produce such a plan, you could begin with a simple spider gram.
This has the advantageous of being quick to do, but it doesn’t ensure you are covering all your bases.
If you have a linear mind, you might prefer a bullet point plan, or a table, like these this.
I have two personal favourites when helping students to compare poems, and these are the Venn diagram and the detailed spider diagram. Both ensure all ingredients for a top scoring essay are included and both allow students to number their points, so that they can structure their essay.
A worked example
Here’s how I used the detailed spider diagram to plan a comparison essay on Simon Armitage’s Remains and Jane Weir’s Poppies.
It’s a bit visually overwhelming when looked at like this, but I did it step by step with a student during one of our lessons, using a visualiser so it was much more manageable.
If you'd like your teen to learn how to best compare poems and other text
First of all, we made sure that we were answering the essay question in our plan. As you can see from the below slide exam questions generally ask the student to approach the comparison from a particular angle. On this occasion, my students chose to plan and essay on the Effect of Conflict in both poems.
In the introduction, I encouraged the student to find the similarities in the context between the two poems and then branch out to talk about their overall differences when describing the effect of conflict.
We then moved on to exploring structure and form. As you can see, for each point planned, there’s information on both poems, to ensure that both are analysed thoroughly in the essay, and similar aspects are compared.
When planning language analysis, there’s generally a huge amount that could be covered, but it’s probably best to choose two – three types of language/ techniques to focus on. Once you’ve done this, it’s easier to find similarities between the texts. For example, whereas in Remains, the soldier’s language communicates a carelessness towards life, the mother in Poppies is painstakingly careful about preparing her son to face the outside world.
Once the language groundwork is done, you can move on to talking about overarching feelings and attitudes conveyed by the poem, and this will, hopefully, lead you to the conclusion.
There is, of course, quite a lot of work to do to prepare for a written poetry analysis. You need to know how to write a strong introductory paragraph, for example, and to use linking expressions accurately. However, a detailed plan is a very good start. If you’d like to take the stress out of poetry analysis and comparison, and to approach the question in the exam with confidence, just get in touch.
