Topic Summaries

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GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Love and Relationships Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis > Annotations
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‘Before You Were Mine’ by Carol Ann Duffy

‘Climbing My Grandfather’ by Andrew Waterhouse

‘Eden Rock’ by Charles Causley

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ by Charlotte Mew

‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney

‘Letters from Yorkshire’ by Maura Dooley

‘Love’s Philosophy’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘Mother, any distance’ by Simon Armitage

‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy

‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning

‘Singh Song!’ by Daljit Nagra

‘Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis

‘When We Two Parted’ by Lord Byron

‘Winter Swans’ by Owen Sheers

Key ideas to compare between poems

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day —

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled— since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from metowards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take — the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show —

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

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