1st Date – She and 1st Date – He — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
1st Date – She and 1st Date – He
The poems
What you need to know
Two matching poems about the same concert date: each person pretends to like classical music, worries about how they look and what to say, and wrongly thinks the other is lost in the music.
How Cope's conversational language, small admissions and shared phrases reveal that both speakers are pretending, and that each misreads the other.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I said I liked classical music', 'It wasn't exactly a lie', 'That my brow was acceptably high', 'I hope I look tastefully sexy', 'I couldn't care less what they play', 'Of rapt concentration', 'It wasn't entirely untrue', 'The neckline can't fail to intrigue', 'Perhaps she is out of my league', 'I'd better start paying attention'.
Form: two linked monologues of five quatrains each, rhyming ABCB, with mirrored openings and the shared line 'And quite undistracted by me', so that only the reader knows what both are thinking.
Context: Wendy Cope (born 1945), known for witty verse with neat rhymes about men, women and everyday life; Family Values, her 2011 collection; and classical music as a sign of being cultured.
Compares well with: Valentine (honesty and pretence), i wanna be yours (modern, playful love poems), She Walks in Beauty (attraction and appearance) and My Last Duchess (what a speaker gives away without meaning to).
