Past Duffy/Armitage/Pre-1914 Literature Exam Questions

Your essay writing skills will improve the more you practice. You can use the past questions below to plan answers, write parts of essays (e.g. introductions) and even write whole essays. I will be happy to mark and give you feedback on any extra essays you do independently. It will sometimes be worthwhile writing full essays but planning an answer and writing parts of essays is a really useful exercise.

There are 3 different ways the questions will be structured:

1. You will be given one named poem and you have to pick 3 others (usually one from the other key poet – Duffy or Armitage – and two pre-1914 poems)
2. You will be given two lists from which you pick two poems from each list. This is usually a little bit easier than the above as they’ve done a bit of the work of selecting poems for you.
3. You will be given a question broken up into two halves. These are effective two different questions for which you only have to compare two in each section which is obviously easier to manage. Do not fall into the trap of only answering one question – give half an hour to each section and treat them like two mini-essays.

1) Compare how death or the threat of death is presented in the poems you have studied. Choose two poems from List A and two from List B.

List A                                                                           List B

Havisham (Duffy)                                                   On my first Sonne. (Jonson)

Education for Leisure (Duffy)                          The Laboratory (Browning)

Hitcher (Armitage)                                              The Man He Killed. (Hardy)

November (Armitage) .                                      My Last Duchess. (Browning)

2) Compare how women are presented in four of the poems you have studied. To do this, compare Mother, any distance by Simon Armitage and three other poems, one by Carol Ann Duffy and two from the Pre-1914 Poetry Bank. Compare:

              –  the women in the poems

              –  how they are presented

3) Answer both parts (a) and (b).

 (a) Compare how the poets make the reader feel sympathy for the speaker in On my first Sonne by Ben Jonson and the speaker in one poem by Carol Ann Duffy

and then

(b) Compare how the reader is made to feel disturbed by the speaker’s words and actions in one poem by Simon Armitage and one poem from the Pre-1914 Poetry Bank.

4) Compare how the poets present attitudes to people in Hitcher by Simon Armitage with one poem by Carol Ann Duffy and two poems from the Pre-1914 Poetry Bank. Compare:

              –  what the attitudes to people are

              –  how the poets present these attitudes by the ways they write