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Power and Conflict: the fifteen poems in brief

A quick reminder of every poem in the cluster, grouped by the idea they share. Each one has the poet, what happens, the main idea and a short quotation to learn.

Quick guide for students · 8 minute read

AQA’s Power and Conflict cluster has fifteen poems. In the exam (Literature Paper 2, Section B), the question names one of them and prints it on the paper. You compare it with one other poem from the cluster. That second poem comes from memory, because you cannot take the anthology into the exam. So you need to know all fifteen.

Six of the poems are old enough to be out of copyright. The other nine are still in copyright, so we quote only a few words from each of those. Read them in full in your anthology.

To use the poems in the exam, read How to compare two poems. To make the quotations stick, read How to learn quotations.

Rulers and their power

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in 1818.

A traveller tells the speaker about a broken statue in the desert. Only the legs still stand. The face lies half sunk in the sand, and the base still carries the king’s proud words. The poem is a sonnet (a fourteen-line poem).

Shelley’s point is that human power does not last. Time and nature win.

“The lone and level sands stretch far away” is the last line. It is long and flat, like the empty desert.

My Last Duchess

By Robert Browning, published in 1842.

A duke shows a visitor a painting of his dead wife. The visitor has come to arrange the Duke’s next marriage. As he talks, the Duke complains that his wife smiled at everyone and did not value his name. The poem is a dramatic monologue: one character speaks to a silent listener and gives away more than he means to.

Browning shows a man with total power who treated his wife as something he owned.

“I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together” is the Duke’s calm admission that he had her silenced, and perhaps killed.

London

By William Blake, published in 1794 in Songs of Experience.

The speaker walks the streets of London and sees misery in every face. He names a chimney sweep, a soldier and a young prostitute, and he links each one to the church, the king’s palace or marriage. The poem has four four-line stanzas with a regular rhyme.

Blake blames those in power for the suffering around them.

“mind-forg’d manacles”: manacles are chains, and Blake says people make them in their own minds, out of fear and the ideas they are taught.

Checking Out Me History

By John Agard, published in 2004 in Half-Caste and Other Poems.

The speaker complains that his school taught him about 1066, Columbus and nursery-rhyme characters, and left out Black heroes. Separate stanzas, printed in italics, tell the stories of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nanny de Maroon and Mary Seacole. The speaker’s own lines are in a voice shaped by Caribbean Creole, with its own spellings.

Agard shows that whoever decides what history is taught has power over who you become. His speaker takes that power back.

“Bandage up me eye with me own history” turns his schooling into an injury: it has blinded him to his own past.

Nature’s power

The Prelude (extract)

By William Wordsworth, published in 1850, after his death.

The adult speaker remembers a night from his childhood. As a boy he takes a boat without asking and rows out on a lake, full of confidence. Then a huge mountain peak seems to rise up and follow him. He rows back in fear, and the memory troubles him for days.

Wordsworth sets a boy’s pride against nature, and nature wins.

“a huge peak, black and huge”: the word comes twice, so the mountain seems to grow as the boy stares at it.

Storm on the Island

By Seamus Heaney, who was born and grew up in Northern Ireland.

An islander speaks for the whole community, using “we”. At first the people feel ready for a storm in their low, strong houses. As the storm arrives, their confidence turns to fear. The wind and the sea attack the island like an army, and the islanders can only sit and wait.

Heaney shows nature’s power as huge and invisible. People cannot control it.

“a huge nothing that we fear” ends the poem. The enemy is the wind, and nobody can see it.

Exposure

By Wilfred Owen, published in 1920 in Poems, edited by Siegfried Sassoon. Owen was killed in November 1918, a week before the fighting stopped.

Soldiers in the First World War wait in the trenches through a freezing night. They expect an attack, but the real danger is the cold. The weather is personified (given human actions), as if it were an enemy soldier, and the men begin to die of exposure.

Owen shows war as slow suffering, with nature as the deadliest enemy.

“But nothing happens” comes back again and again, so the reader waits with the men.

Soldiers in battle

The Charge of the Light Brigade

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1854.

During the Crimean War, a mistaken order sends six hundred horsemen into a valley lined with enemy guns. They obey without question and charge. Far fewer ride back. The rhythm gallops like horses’ hooves.

Tennyson honours the soldiers’ courage, even though their leaders made a blunder.

“Someone had blundered”: Tennyson admits the mistake in three words, then moves straight back to the soldiers’ bravery.

Bayonet Charge

By Ted Hughes, published in 1957 in his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain.

A soldier in the First World War runs at the enemy line with his rifle and bayonet (a blade fixed to the end of the rifle). The poem starts in the middle of the action. Time seems to stop, and he wonders why he is running at all. Then a hare appears, twisting in pain, and he drops his ideals and runs to survive.

Hughes, whose own father fought in the First World War, shows patriotic ideals falling away as fear takes over.

“King, honour, human dignity, etcetera”: the ideals end in “etcetera”, as if they no longer matter.

Remains

By Simon Armitage.

A soldier tells the story of a shooting. He and two other soldiers fire at a looter running from a bank. At first the story sounds casual. Then the poem follows him home, and the dead man stays in his mind. Drink and drugs do not help, and he cannot escape the memory.

Armitage shows a soldier carrying the guilt of a killing long after the fighting.

“probably armed, possibly not”: the doubt keeps coming back and will not let him rest.

Memory, loss and identity

War Photographer

By Carol Ann Duffy, first published in 1985 in Standing Female Nude.

A photographer is alone in his darkroom, developing photographs he took in war zones. The room is described like a church, and he works like a priest. A face slowly appears in one picture, and he remembers the scene. His editor will choose a few pictures for a Sunday paper. Readers will feel sad for a moment and then forget, and by the end the photographer is on a plane again.

Duffy shows people at home looking at suffering, and not caring for long.

“spools of suffering set out in ordered rows”: the rolls of film hold other people’s pain, and the repeated s sounds slow the line down.

Poppies

By Jane Weir, from her first collection, The Way I Dressed During the Revolution.

A mother speaks to her son as he leaves home to join the army. She pins a poppy on him, smooths his collar and holds back her feelings. After he has gone, she walks to a war memorial and listens for his voice.

Weir shows the loss and fear that conflict brings to the people left at home.

“your playground voice catching on the wind”: she hears him as a small child, just as she loses him.

Kamikaze

By Beatrice Garland.

A pilot’s daughter tells her children about her father. He was a Japanese pilot in the Second World War, sent on a kamikaze mission: he was meant to die in the attack. Flying over the sea, he saw its beauty, remembered his childhood and turned back. At home, his wife, his neighbours and later his own children treated him as though he no longer existed.

Garland shows how a society’s idea of honour can destroy one person.

The last lines wonder which had been “the better way to die”: the death he turned away from, or the silence he came home to.

The Émigrée

By Carol Rumens.

An émigrée is a woman who has left her own country, often to escape war or danger. The speaker left her city as a child and cannot go back. She remembers it as bright and full of sunlight. Across the three stanzas the threat grows: the city may be at war, or ruled by tyrants (cruel rulers). Even so, the city becomes a companion that comforts her.

Rumens shows memory and love giving a person power against the state.

“My city takes me dancing”: the city is personified as a friend, and her memory of it is stronger than the rulers who keep her out.

Tissue

By Imtiaz Dharker, published in 2006 in The Terrorist at My Table.

The speaker thinks about paper: the thin pages of a family Koran, maps, receipts. Paper is thin enough to let light through, and the speaker imagines buildings made of it. The poem ends by turning to human skin.

Dharker shows that the things people build, such as borders, cities and power, are fragile.

“never meant to last”: what people build was never supposed to be permanent.

Sources

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