Love & Relationships

• Different types of love:

  • unrequited love
  • happy & unhappy marriages
  • affairs & forbidden love
  • desire
  • threat of violence in relationships
  • break-ups and the pain they cause
• What poets are trying to examine, challenge and criticise:

  • gender roles within relationships
  • the convention of marriage within society
  • cultural/ social expectations of women in relationships
  • sex and consent
• Family poems:

  • Follower by Seamus Heaney
  • Mother, any distance by SImon Armitage
  • Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis
  • Before you were mine by Carol Ann Duffy
  • Eden Rock by Charles Causley
  • Climbing my Grandfather by Andrew Waterhouse
  • Singh Song by Daljit Nagra
• Society's view of love is that it is romantic, passionate and beautiful.
• Longing in Romantic Poetry:

  • desire: explores ideas around unhealthy male desire and issues around consent within and outside of marriage
  • romantic fulfillment- longing for a future relationship/ past relationship
• Distance in Love & Relationships Poetry:

  • physical and emotional distance between two people
  • growing distance between child / parent
• Key themes related to DISTANCE:

  nostalgia

  memory

  letting go

  independence
• Poems that use the theme of DISTANCE


  Winter Swans

  Mother, any distance

  Follower

  Eden Rock

  Walking Away

  The Farmer's Bride

  Neutral Tones
• Poems that use the theme of ROMANTIC LOVE


  When We Two Parted

  Love's Philosophy

  Porphyria's Lover

  Sonnet 29- 'I think of thee'

  Neutral Tones

  Winter Swans