AQA GCSE English Literature (9-1): Power and Conflict Poetry Anthology

5 Key Quotes per poem: Memorise one poem’s quotes per theme.
Ozymandias, by ‘I met a traveller from an antique land’
Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed’
Power of nature
‘sneer of cold command’
Power of humans
Emotions (Pride) ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
‘Nothing beside remains.’
London, by William ‘chartered streets… where the chartered Thames does flow’
Blake ‘mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
Power of Humans ‘mind forged manacles’
Loss and Absence
Emotions (Pride, Anger) ‘Every black’ning church appals’
‘blights with plagues the marriage hearse.’
(Extract from) The ‘Straight I unloosened her chain… it was an act of stealth’
Prelude, by William ‘proud of his skill’
Wordsworth ‘grim shape towered up between me and the stars’
Power of nature
Memory
‘huge and mighty forms… were a trouble to my dreams.’
Emotions (Pride, Fear) ‘my boat went heaving through the water like a swan’
My Last Duchess, by ‘since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I’
Robert Browning ‘She had a heart - …to soon made glad’
Power of Humans ‘She liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere’
Memory
Emotions (Pride, Anger) ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred years-old name/With anybody’s gift’
‘I gave commands;/then all smiles stopped altogether.’
The Charge of the ‘Some one had blundered’
Light Brigade, by ‘Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘Into the jaws of death rode the 500’ / ‘Into the mouth of hell rode the 500’
Conflict
Identity
‘Cannon to the right of them / Cannon to the left of them / Cannon behind them’
‘Honour the Light Brigade! / Honour the charge they made! / Noble six hundred!’
Exposure, by Wilfred ‘Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us…’
Owen ‘Dawn masking … her melancholy army’
Power of Nature ‘Pale Flakes with fingering stealth come feeling our faces –‘
Conflict
Loss and Absence ‘Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed’
‘All their eyes are ice / but nothing happens’
Storm on the Island, ‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat / Sink walls in a rock / roof with good slate’
by Seamus Heaney ‘It pummels your house too’
Power of Nature ‘Exploding comfortably’
Power of Humans
Emotions (Fear) ‘We just sit tight while wind dives / and strafes invisibly … space is a salvo’
‘Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear’
Bayonet Charge, by ‘Suddenly he awoke and was running’
Ted Hughes ‘He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm’
Conflict ‘In bewilderment … almost stopped-‘
Emotions (Fear)
Individual Experiences ‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera’
‘His terror’s touchy dynamite’
Remains, by Simon ‘On another occasion, we sent out / to tackle looters raiding a bank’
Armitage ‘probably armed, possibly not’
Conflict ‘I see every round as it rips through his life-‘
Memory
Emotions (Guilt) ‘tosses his guts back into his body.’
Individual Experiences ‘blood shadow… his bloody life in my bloody hands’
Poppies, by Jane Weir ‘Spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade/of yellow bias binding’
Conflict ‘Sellotape bandaged around my hand’
Loss and Absence
Memory ‘All my worlds/flattened, rolled, turned into felt’
Emotions (Fear) ‘released a song bird from its cage / later a single dove flew from the pear tree’
Identity
Individual Experiences ‘your playground voice catching on the wind’
War Photographer, by ‘spools of suffering set out in ordered rows’
Carol Ann Duffy ‘Belfast, Beirut, Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.’
Conflict ‘fields which don’t explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat’
Loss and Absence
Emotions (Anger, Guilt) ‘A hundred agonies in black and white’
Identity ‘The reader’s eyeballs prick / with tears between the bath and pre lunch beers’
Tissue, by Imitaz ‘Paper… could alter things’
Darkher ‘pages smoothed and stroked and turned’
Power of Nature ‘Fine slips … might fly our lives like paper kites’
Power of Humans
Identity ‘Raise a structure / never meant to last’
‘turned into your skin’
The Emigree, by Carol ‘There was once a country / My memory of it is sunlight clear’
Rumens ‘but I am branded by an impression of sunlight’
Loss and Absence ‘but I can’t get it off my tongue, for it tastes of sunlight
Memory
Identity ‘my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight’
Individual Experiences ‘They accuse of absence, they circle me’
Checking Out Me ‘Dem tell me/ what dem want to tell me’
History, by John ‘Bandage up me eye… Blind me to me own identity’
Agard ‘Dem tell me about Columbus and 1942/ But what happen to the de Caribs and de Arawaks too’
Power of Humans
Emotions (Anger)
‘But now I checking out me own history’
Identity ‘I carving out me identity’
Kamikaze, by Beatrice ‘a shaven head / full of powerful incantations’
Garland ‘little fishing boats / strung out like bunting / on a green blue translucent sea’
Power of Humans ‘the dark prince, muscular, dangerous’
Conflict
Loss and Absence ‘as though he no longer existed’
Memory ‘he must have wondered / which was the better way to die.’
Identity