Poetry – Section B: Specified Poetry Pre- or Post-1900 – Pre-1900 – The…

The idea

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's twelve-line lyric answers its opening question, "What's the best thing in the world?", by cataloguing imagined pleasures stripped of their usual costs. A "June-rose" keeps May's dew, truth does not hurt a friend, pleasure does not hurry to end, memory brings no pain and love is returned. The repeated question frames this accumulating list, while compressed phrases, semicolons and interlocking rhymes give it the pace of a playful riddle. The final answer, "Something out of it, I think", unsettles every candidate: the best may be beyond worldly experience, or the line may wryly expose the impossibility of demanding perfect pleasure without loss.

What earns the marks

• Analyse how the repeated opening question and catalogue structure turn an abstract inquiry into a sequence of vivid, qualified examples.
• Explore the pattern by which each pleasure is protected from a drawback: truth avoids cruelty, pleasure avoids ending and memory avoids pain.
• Evaluate the importance of reciprocated love as the catalogue's final worldly possibility before the repeated question returns.
• Discuss the ambiguity of "Something out of it, I think": it can suggest transcendence, scepticism about worldly perfection, or a deliberately light final paradox.
• Analyse how compact syntax, rhyme and the single-stanza form make the philosophical argument sound conversational and memorable.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Assuming the title supplies a simple celebration of love.

  Put it right: The poem tests several ideals and ends by locating the answer ambiguously outside the world.

• Reading each item as an unrelated pretty image.

  Put it right: Notice that almost every pleasure is defined by the absence of an associated harm or limitation.

• Treating the final line as an unequivocal statement of religious faith.

  Put it right: Its tentative "I think" also permits wit, uncertainty and scepticism.

Exam tips

• Use the opening and closing questions as structural anchors for an AO1–AO3 argument about how the speaker's answer changes.
• Pair brief quotations such as "Truth, not cruel" and "Memory, that gives no pain" to show the catalogue's repeated logic.
• If referring to another poem from the specified collection, use the connection to sharpen analysis of Browning's language and Victorian context rather than treating comparison as a separate AO.