How do you prepare for and answer a comparitive unseen poetry question?

The best way to prepare for an unseen poetry question is to familiarise yourself with common themes, as well as linguistic and structural devices, that you will be able to recognise in any poem you are faced with. A handy way to remember a lot of techniques is to create a checklist for yourself in the form of an acronym, which you can recall at the start of your exam. Also key to your preparation is the use of past papers, as although you will not be able to study the unseen poems in advance of the exam, being able to identify the key features of, as well as similarities and differences between two poems is a hugely important skill, and the more practice you do, the easier comparative exercises like these become. Once in the exam, read carefully through each poem and immediately note down the most striking features of each. What message are they trying to convey? How does the poem make you feel? What kind of tone is being conveyed? These are the fundamentals which will help make a confusingly worded poem easier to understand. Your second step is to read through the poems again. This time, look for the more subtle linguistic and structural features, noting down as you go. Most importantly, don’t forget to state the relevance of the features you have identified in relation to the overall feel of the piece that you identified on your first read. If there is use of onomatopoeia, what effect does this have on that particular section of the poem? How do the structure of the sentences or stanzas affect the flow and the tone of the poem? And so on. Your final task is comparison, as this should be the primary focus of your essay. It might be useful to split your observations into three categories: themes and ideas, language and imagery, and structure and form. These could also make up the subject of each paragraph in your essay, as this way you will not forget to include a wide range of points. Once you have compared the two poems across these three categories, you can draw your conclusion from your overall reaction to both pieces based on their specific features. How did one make you feel in comparison to the other, and why/how did the poet accomplish this? I hope this is useful! Below is an example checklist which I created in the form of the acronym ‘smart-ish poetry’: Simile, Metaphor, Alliteration, Repetition, Tempo, Imagery, Sentence Structure, Hyperbole, Punctuation, Onomatopoeia, Enjambement, Title, Rhyme scheme, Your reaction?