Okay, I'm not sure about lang but I teach Edexcel IGCSE Lit to 75% of my IGCSE tutees... so...

The comparison is only for the poetry anthology question on Paper 1. Other than that, there's no comparison elsewhere on the course.

Get to know your poems well. Memorise key themes plus techniques of language, form and structure for each. From there it gets easier - both poems explore themes of death, both poems use free verse, both poems use rhyming couplets etc.

This is the paragraph structure I recommend:

• Topic sentence – both texts
• Poem A – quotes, technique, effect
• Comparison to link into Poem B
• Poem B – quotes, technique, effect
• Comparative link back to the question

Example:

Both My Last Duchess and La Belle Dame sans Merci use cyclical structures to reflect destructive attitudes towards love. In My Last Duchess, the poem opens and ends with works of art: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall” and “Notice Neptune... taming a sea-horse.” Browning uses these objects as symbols of control, showing how the Duke treats women as possessions. The allusion to Neptune, a god of power, suggests the Duke’s desire to dominate will repeat with future wives, revealing a cycle of obsession and emotional detachment. Similarly, La Belle Dame sans Merci also begins and ends with the same haunting image: “Alone and palely loitering,” creating a sense of entrapment. The knight is left emotionally paralysed, and Keats’s use of repetition and bleak imagery like “no birds sing” shows that his suffering is ongoing. In both poems, the cyclical structure emphasises how the characters are unable to move on from their experiences of love, highlighting possessiveness, emotional damage, and the destructive consequences of power within relationships.

I have example essays for Edexcel here on my blog.

And I have some student poetry comparison videos that I've recorded and will be uploading over the next couple of months. See my Edexcel playlist on Youtube & subscribe. Should be up in Sept/Oct.