yeah no i didnt mean to memorise the whole essay. im just saying however, that if you have key ideas, for each poem. Written in a nice neat little sentence, then if it does pop up on the exam (that poem) then you're set, as you already know exactly what you want to say.
i think it goes especially with Donne, because there is something like 11 or 12 poems (and they're not that long), and if you know your links between each poem, especially with the religious and love poetry, then it will be easier when it comes to the exam to get what you want to say out. for example,, say valediction comes in the exam,
i would use stuff from my practise essays.
The speaker and his mistress “melt apart, slowly and gently, in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Teamed with the gentle, whispered sibilance of the opening lines of this poem, Donne reiterates the stillness, and the slow parting of a couple whose love is so much refined and “inter-assurèd of the mind.” Their love contains a quality that cannot be separated and is similar to the love contained in The Canonization – like a phoenix, which burns and rekindles, ‘dies’ and comes back just as strong as ever. Donne asserts that their love is the most refined element, “like gold to airy thinness beat” and no matter how far away this departure takes him, they will be connected, like a painstakingly thin sheet of gold. The intense power of the speakers imagination makes the impossible possible. This is an image of rarefied beauty, one that unites the sold and tangible with the ethereal and insubstantial. It is an outstanding declaration which makes the unachievable seem achievable, which makes it possible for “round earth’s imagined corners” to exist.
etc.
i never meant for anyone to memorise a whole essay and do it like that ! haha . just knowing your stuff, and having pre-prepared killer phrases in the case that that poem is one of the set passages in the exam.