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What examiners reward in unseen poetry

Section C of AQA’s Literature Paper 2 is worth 32 marks and gives students two poems they have never seen. The examiners’ reports ask for the same things year after year: meaning first, methods only with their effects, a comparison of how the poets write, and a short second answer.

Long read · 8 minute read

The last section of AQA’s Literature Paper 2 prints a poem students have never seen and asks how the poet presents something in it, for 24 marks. A second question prints another poem and asks students to compare the methods the two poets use, for 8 marks. In the June 2023 mark scheme, the 24 marks are split evenly between AO1 and AO2, and the 8 marks are all AO2. There are no marks for context and none for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

It is also a section where students can do well. The June 2023 report found that “Often students provided stronger responses to the unseen than they had managed in Sections A and B.”

The question numbers changed in 2025

The 2018 and 2023 reports call the two questions 27.1 and 27.2. In June 2025, the first paper to include AQA’s new Worlds and Lives cluster in Section B, they were numbered 28.1 and 28.2. AQA’s subject content page lists the cluster as first taught in 2023 and first examined in 2025. To avoid confusion, this page calls them the first question and the comparison question, and gives each report’s numbering where it quotes one.

How much time they get

The specification gives Paper 2 two hours and 15 minutes for 96 marks. Section C carries 32 of those marks, a third of the paper, so it gets about 45 minutes. By marks alone, the comparison question would get about 11 of them.

The reports keep warning against giving it more. The June 2018 report told students: “Don’t spend too much time on the final question as it is only worth 8 marks.” The 2023 report found that “There was an occasional issue in Section C with some students spending a little more time on 27.2 than is warranted by the marks available”. In 2025 the advice to students included: “Time spent planning at the start, and proofreading at the end, is often more helpful than spending every minute writing your response.”

Our unit gives the first question about 30 minutes and the comparison about 15. In the end-of-unit assessment the 45 minutes run like this: five to read the first poem and plan, 23 to write, 13 to read the second poem twice and write the comparison, and four to check, about two for each answer. Students move on to the comparison when their 28 minutes are up, finished or not. The comparison gets a few more minutes than its marks alone would earn because it starts with a second poem to read.

The first question: meaning first

The June 2025 report is the plainest statement of what the 24 marks are for:

“In Question 28.1 examiners want to hear your interpretation of the poem. There aren’t many marks for just spotting techniques like similes or alliteration. The most successful candidates go on to link these to the big ideas of the poem.”

The earlier reports describe the same thing from the scripts. In 2023 the first poem was ‘Scaffolding’, built on an extended metaphor, and “Students wrote convincingly when they explored the significance of ‘masons’, ‘ladders’ ‘joints’ and ‘bridges’ rather than technique-spotting and trying to write about, for example, alliteration, sibilance and enjambment.” The June 2022 report said: “Realising the symbolic and metaphorical significance was a marker of more successful responses.”

Length does not make up for a missing interpretation. In 2025 examiners sometimes reported reaching the end of long answers without knowing whether the student had understood the poem, because the student “didn’t take the time to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what the writer is saying.”

Two habits help. The first is a short opening that answers the question for the whole poem. The 2023 report approved of students who went straight into the poem without long preambles, and said that “Beginning with a short introduction that demonstrates clear understanding of ideas linked to methods can be useful”. The second is staying with the words on the page. In 2018 the answers that did better “kept their comments firmly rooted in the text”, and avoided long speculation about the speaker’s family and what could be done to help them.

The same goes for the poet’s life. With no marks for context in this section, a paragraph of biography costs time and earns nothing. Our unit’s teacher notes allow a date or a fact about the poet in a sentence at most.

Technique spotting

The reports from 2022, 2023 and 2025 all complain about methods named and left there. In 2025: “A recurring issue in Question 28.1 was ‘technique spotting’, where students listed features without exploring their effect or relevance.” In 2023, of devices such as sibilance and enjambment: “They were able to identify these features, but struggled to discuss them in terms of the ideas and effects.” In 2022 there were “some confused and less convincing attempts to write about, for example, enjambement and caesura”.

The 2025 report’s section on AO2 puts it more bluntly: “But too often students are peppering their responses with techniques they don’t understand.” Its section on the unseen poems gives an example: “For example, vague or unsupported references to a ‘semantic field’ added little when not explored with clarity or purpose.”

The other side of this is reassuring. A method does not need a technical name to earn marks. The 2022 report said: “Writer’s choices is a perfectly acceptable ‘method’ and many clearly understood this.” A student who writes that the poet makes the speaker repeat one word four times, and explains why, is analysing a method. A student who writes the word anaphora and stops is not.

The comparison question is about methods

The comparison question goes wrong in two opposite ways. The first is comparing what the poems are about. The 2018 report found that “often students wrote some lovely responses to the ideas in both poems but neglected to mention anything that either writer had done on purpose to make meaning”, and added: “Students would really benefit from remembering that this task is all about the ‘ways’ as stipulated in the question.”

The second is listing methods with nothing attached. In 2023, “Students struggled to move out of Level 1 if they pointed to methods without exemplification and discussion of effects.” The 2025 report made the same point about its comparison question: “With Question 28.2, although AO2 is the only assessment focus, this still doesn’t mean that students should ‘technique spot’. It is impossible to analyse in a vacuum.” It described what the best answers did: “The best responses tended to compare, for example, the speakers, the tone, the symbolism and the effects.”

So a good comparison point names a method used in both poems, quotes each poem and says how the effects are alike or different. Here is the model paragraph from Lesson 10 of our unit. The question asks students to compare the methods Claude McKay and W. B. Yeats use to present their speakers’ longing for a place far away, in ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.

What
Both poets use water imagery to show that the longing has entered the speaker’s body.
How
Yeats’s speaker hears “lake water lapping with low sounds”, and the repeated l sounds are soft and steady, like small waves. McKay’s speaker feels “A wave of longing through my body swept”. The verb “swept” is fast and violent, whereas “lapping” is gentle and keeps on returning.
Why
The effect on the reader is different. Yeats’s water calms the speaker, so the longing feels like a promise he can hold “in the deep heart’s core”. McKay’s wave knocks the speaker over, so by the last line he has “bowed my head and wept”. Yeats presents longing as comfort; McKay presents it as grief.
Model paragraph from Unseen poetry, Lesson 10: Planning question 27.2

The paragraph never says that both poems are about missing home. It starts from a method both poets use, water imagery, and spends its time on the difference between “lapping” and “swept”.

A routine for any poem

Students cannot revise the poems, so our unseen poetry scheme teaches a way of reading instead. The routine goes from what the poem says to how it says it, which is also the order an answer needs:

  1. Read for sense: what happens, where and when.
  2. Find the speaker, who may or may not be the poet.
  3. Name the feeling, and find where it changes.
  4. Ask how the poet does it, marking only what answers the question.
  5. Sum up the poem in one sentence that answers the question.

Lesson 1 practises the first steps on Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’. Students hear the poem twice: after the first reading they note what happens, who speaks and what changes; after the second, they write one first impression and underline the words that gave it to them. Lesson 3, on the turn at line 9 of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’, is the free lesson sampler.

Lessons 9 and 10 put the routine on a clock. For the first question, students spend two minutes annotating with the question in mind, one minute on a thesis that covers the whole poem and two on three or four points in poem order. For the comparison, they take three minutes to fill a grid, with a row for each of two or three methods and a column for each poem, then write point by point, joining the poems with whereas or similarly.

The unit’s twelve poems are all in the public domain and are taught in themed pairs, so every poem studied alone is also practice for the comparison. The routine is written up for students in A routine for any unseen poem, and context, which earns nothing here, is covered in Context in Literature essays.

What the reports cannot settle

Examiners’ reports describe one year’s scripts. They show what strong answers did; they cannot show what teaching produced those answers.

They also leave the shape of the comparison open. The 2025 advice to students says of the anthology question in Section B that “There is no requirement to compare poems all the way through”, and nothing in the unseen sections of these reports requires a particular structure. We teach the comparison point by point because a 15-minute answer has room for two or three points, and a point that leaves out one of the poems is not yet a comparison. Other structures can work, as long as both poems and their methods stay in view.

Sources

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