What the exam asks
Paper 2 is the same paper at SL and HL. It gives four general questions about how literature works; you answer one by comparing and/or contrasting two literary works studied in class. Because the exam is closed-book, examiners expect detailed references (titles, stanzas, structural turns) rather than long memorized quotations, though short verified phrases sharpen your analysis. Criterion B is worth 10 of the 25 marks and splits into B1 (evaluating textual features and broader authorial choices, 5 marks) and B2 (comparative analysis, 5 marks).
In a poetry collection, the “work” is the whole set of poems studied. A strong Paper 2 essay analyses two or three poems closely and gestures toward the wider pattern across the rest.
Core ideas
Question types the poems answer well
Every Paper 2 prompt asks how two works present or use a literary concept through authorial choices (Criterion B1). One sentence of checkable biographical or historical context may clarify why two writers differ (a smart B2 move), but context is never the argument.
- Refusing an expected role: “Phenomenal Woman”, “Still I Rise”, “Woman Work”. Choices: Direct address, the domestic catalogue, the refrain that refuses debate.
- Speaking out / voice given to the unheard: “Still I Rise”, “Caged Bird”, “Woman Work”. Choices: Second-person confrontation; alternating stanzas contrasting free and caged birds; the working woman’s breathless list.
- Power held and resisted: “Still I Rise”, “Caged Bird”, “Harlem Hopscotch”. Choices: Street-game chant rhythm; a refrain that outlasts hostility; song as the sole remaining act.
- The hold of the past over the present: “On the Pulse of Morning”, “A Brave and Startling Truth”, “Still I Rise”. Choices: Personifying Rock, River, and Tree; cataloguing historical violence; addressing history directly as “you”.
- The outsider: “Alone”, “Awaking in New York”, “Caged Bird”. Choices: The communal refrain of “Alone”; the solitary urban watcher.
- Parent and child: “Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me”. Choices: Apostrophe (direct address to the mother) and chronological progression.
- Recurring image or motif: Bird and cage, dust and air, sun and moon, kitchen and field. Choices: Turning natural elements into symbols of endurance (“like dust, I’ll rise”; “bars of rage”).
- Titles: Every poem carries a distinct title: “Still I Rise” (where the title becomes the refrain), “Caged Bird”, “Phenomenal Woman”, “Woman Work”.
- Openings and endings: Plain declarative openings against lifting or reversing final lines in “Harlem Hopscotch”, “Still I Rise”, and “On the Pulse of Morning” (“Good morning.”).
- What is left unsaid: “Woman Work” never names the employer; the free bird in “Caged Bird” never speaks; “Alone” never specifies whom the speaker is isolated from.
- Words that wound or heal / lasting loss: “Still I Rise” counters hostile speech with its own; “Alone” and “Caged Bird” turn grief into vocal testimony.