Cambridge O Level Literature in English 2010 Past Papers 2026

Poetry and Prose

Duration: 1h 30m

Drama

Duration: 1h 30m

Analysing writers' methods (form, structure, language)

Candidates repeatedly identified literary devices without explaining their effects. Comments on enjambment, caesura and rhyme were generic ('increases the pace') with no specific textual example or contextual analysis.

Paper 1, Paper 2

Passage-based questions — selecting relevant material

Many candidates worked through passages line-by-line rather than selecting key moments. Some wrote exhaustively about every detail instead of focusing on the most significant parts of the passage that addressed the question.

Paper 1, Paper 2

General essay questions — deploying textual evidence from across the whole text

Candidates answering general essay questions lacked sufficient direct quotations and relied on unsupported assertion. Some relied exclusively on the printed extract instead of drawing on wider knowledge of the text.

Paper 1, Paper 2

Drama as performance — stagecraft awareness

Many Paper 2 candidates treated plays as novels, referring to 'the reader' and ignoring stage directions, dramatic irony, soliloquies and the visual nature of performance. Effects were limited to 'makes the audience interested to see what happens next'.

Paper 2

Poetry analysis beyond surface meaning

Less successful responses showed only a basic grasp of surface meanings in poems, explaining content rather than analysing imagery, tone and deeper implications. There was weak analysis of metaphor, symbolism and the effects of specific word choices.

Paper 1

Using quotations effectively

Candidates either copied out long quotations without comment, listed short quotations without analysis, used ellipses that omitted the key words, or gave line references instead of actual quotations.

Paper 1, Paper 2

Maintaining focus on the question throughout the response

Many candidates used questions as prompts to write everything they knew about a character or theme. Pre-learned material on themes (racism, gender roles, the futility of war) was often inserted regardless of relevance to the specific question.

Paper 1, Paper 2

Time management across two responses

Some candidates spent too much time on their first response, which adversely affected their performance across the paper. There were also instances of candidates answering more questions than required.

Paper 1, Paper 2

Identifying the speaker / voice in dialogue or two-voice poems

In Hardy's ‘He Never Expected Much’, less successful candidates could not distinguish which lines were spoken by the speaker addressing the World and which were spoken by the World back to the speaker, leading them to assert that the speaker (rather than the World) had been ‘loved desperately’ or ‘with smooth serenity’.

Paper 1

Recognising the literary form before analysing it

Some candidates referred to a poem as a ‘play’ or to a novel as a ‘play’ — evidence not just of slips of the pen but of a lack of appreciation of a writer's use of form. As a result poetry essays became paraphrases of content and prose essays neglected narrative viewpoint, description and dialogue as writer's tools.

Paper 1

Tracking mood and tone shifts within a single poem or scene

In Hughes's ‘Wind’ and similar texts, stronger candidates traced the calm playful mood of the opening stanzas, the shift to reverence, and the darker mood of fear. Less successful responses treated the poem's tone as a single static thing rather than as something the writer modulates across stanzas.

Paper 1

Symbolism and extended metaphor in context

Stronger responses sustained close engagement with symbolism (e.g. ‘The two voices disappeared into the thick darkness’ in Achebe, or the central metaphor of the fox in Hughes), while weaker responses either ignored symbolism or named it without exploring what it means within the specific moment.

Paper 1, Paper 2