AQA (A): Paper 1 Love through the ages: comparative text AQA Anthology of Love Poetry through the Ages: post-1900
On his quest for human happiness, the protagonist of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is told that ‘marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures’. This oft-quoted aphorism is perhaps exemplified by several of the twentieth-century poems in the AQA anthology of love poetry. Even as they take their first tentative steps into marriage, the newly-weds in ‘Love and a Question’ are pained by the mysterious arrival of a stranger. At the other end of the scale, the daughter who narrates Jennings’ ‘One Flesh’ is pained by her parents’ lack of connectedness. Everything she sees — from separate beds to separate actions — speaks of them being apart. And, in between, there is the speaker of Larkin’s ‘Wild Oats’, whose sniggering descriptions and fake bravado form only a thin veneer of amusement over the reality of his pleasureless single life.
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