John Donne: A Level AHEAD Study Guide (PDF)

Written by Andy Hurley, a former Principal Examiner, this 139-page A4 guide takes students through 26 of Donne’s poems, from ‘The Flea’ and ‘The Good Morrow’ to ‘A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day’ and the Holy Sonnets. Every poem is set out to explore the Assessment Objectives for A Level, aiming to prevent students writing to the wrong AOs. Each has four sections - an Overview for foundational understanding, Close Analysis (AO1 and AO2), Themes and Interpretation (AO1), and Contexts and Critical Views (AO3 and AO5).

The analysis goes beyond identifying techniques to show what they do. Students see how ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ plays on three names so that the doctrine of forgiveness becomes a question about Donne himself, his wife Ann More and Christ. They see why, in ‘The Ecstasy’, the souls are suspended rather than merged and why that delay is the poem’s presentation of love. They learn that in the Holy Sonnets the argument and the rhyme finish in different places, and what that costs the speaker.

What’s inside

• Key Themes
  Making comparisons. Eight Themes, from Physical and Spiritual Love to The Conceit: Paradox, Science and Argument, each with the five poems that serve it best and a worked comparison. The first comparison is colour-coded and annotated to show how each assessment objective is met.
• Critics and Contexts
  Post Reformation religious tension, the new astronomy, Neoplatonism, and mortality and disease in early modern England, each followed by an in practice reading of a single poem. The chapter models how this should be developed in exam response.
• Tackling Examination Questions
  A table showing exactly how assessment objectives are considered in each of the board specifications. The chapter covers the forms questions often take, guidance on building answers and a practice bank of eight questions.
• Getting Creative
  Donne’s afterlife in Eliot, Britten’s Holy Sonnets, Margaret Edson’s Wit and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, plus 25 creative tasks for enrichment and independent study.

The guide ends with a line that sums up its approach: examiners “are looking for someone who has read the poems closely enough to have an argument about them.” The guide is designed to help students become that reader.