Power & Conflict poetry flashcards

Key points

• Pick the poem with the most to say about the question's theme, whether it agrees or clashes.
• Arrogant rulers: Ozymandias with My Last Duchess.
• Nature's power: Exposure with Storm on the Island or The Prelude.
• Glory against horror in war: The Charge of the Light Brigade with Exposure.
• Haunted by death: Remains with War Photographer.

Key points

• Ozymandias is a sonnet with a broken rhyme scheme: the disorder mirrors the shattered statue.
• My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue: the Duke gives himself away in his own words.
• Its strict rhyming couplets reflect his need for control; enjambment hides the rhymes.
• Storm on the Island is blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter that sounds like calm speech.
• War Photographer's regular stanzas mirror his control over the chaos he records.

Key points

• Dactylic metre: a stressed beat then two light ones, like galloping hooves.
• Half-rhyme in Exposure, as in silent and salient, nearly matches and never resolves, like the waiting.

Key points

• Give each paragraph one idea, and write about both poems in it.
• Link them with comparative connectives: whereas, similarly, by contrast, both.
• Give the poem from memory as much close analysis as the printed one.

A comparative sentence

Key points

• Owen fought in the trenches and drew Exposure from the winter of 1917: misery, not glory.
• Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, wrote about the Crimean War in 1854 from a newspaper report.
• Hughes never fought, but his father survived Gallipoli: Bayonet Charge imagines one soldier's terror.
• Armitage based Remains on a soldier's own account of a memory that haunts him.

Key points

• Shelley was a radical who opposed kings: Ozymandias (1818) warns that tyranny never lasts.
• Blake wrote London in the 1790s, stirred by the French Revolution's challenge to kings and the Church.
• Agard was born in Guyana, a British colony, and questions the history its children were taught.
• Kamikaze pilots of the Second World War were shamed if they came back alive.

Key points

• Both show proud rulers through art: a broken statue and a painting the Duke controls.
• Shelley shows power crumbling with time; Browning shows power used to end a life.

Key points

• Everyone the speaker meets is worn down by life in a city run by the powerful.
• The people are chained by the fear and obedience they have been taught, not only by laws.

Key points

• In Exposure the weather, not the enemy, slowly kills the soldiers.
• In Storm on the Island a storm attacks the islanders like an air raid.
• In The Prelude a mountain looms over a boy and shakes his confidence.

Key points

• Tennyson honours the soldiers' courage and duty, though the order was a blunder.
• Owen and Hughes show misery and terror, where patriotic ideals mean nothing.

Key points

• The soldier in Remains replays a killing he cannot forget: a picture of PTSD.
• The photographer cannot forget the faces he develops, while his readers soon move on.

Key points

• In Poppies a mother clings to memories of her son, who has left; the poem never says if he died.
• In Kamikaze a pilot turns back and is shunned by his family, a kind of living death.

Key points

• Agard reclaims the Black history his schooling left out, in his own Caribbean voice.
• The Emigrée's speaker keeps a bright memory of the city she left, whatever rules it now.
• Tissue sets fragile human life above the paper of maps, borders and buildings.

Key points

• The question asks about attitudes to power or conflict; a technique matters only for what it creates.
• Anchor each paragraph in an idea, such as who holds real power, then bring in the methods.
• Explain the effect every time you name a device.

An idea-led comparison