Quick questions on Analysing pre-1900 poetry: close reading older verse - Eduqas A-Level English Literature

The single habit that separates bands is the move from feature to effect. Naming a device ("there is a metaphor", "it is in couplets") earns little; explaining what it does to meaning earns AO2. Write "Chaucer's narrator implies" or "Milton suspends the sense" to keep the focus on craft and away from treating the speaker as a real person.

"Chaucer builds the irony through a narrator who praises while exposing. The couplet's neat closure delivers the surface compliment, but the diction quietly undercuts it, so the balance of the form makes the flattery sound settled and reasonable even as the words let us see through it. The audience is invited to hear the gap between what the narrator asserts and what the tale reveals, and the very smoothness of the verse is what makes the irony bite."

A paraphrasing answer might write "The narrator says good things about the character, but really he is not so good." Upgraded, it becomes analytical: the heroic couplet's antithetical balance delivers praise and undercutting in the same breath, so the form itself stages the irony, letting the reader hear what the narrator will not say.

Which objective dominates Section A part (i), and which supports it? [2 marks]

Why is a conceit more than decoration in metaphysical poetry? [2 marks]

Analyse how the poet uses form and voice to shape meaning in a printed extract from your prescribed pre-1900 text. [part i; marked out of 30]