AQA Power and conflict poems KEY QUOTES

KAMIKAZE (3)

-a shaven head full of powerful incantations

-the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun

-he must have wondered which had been the better way to die

CHECKING OUT ME HISTORY (2)

-dem tell me, dem tell me

-bandage up me eye with me own history / Blind me to me own identity

OZYMANDIAS (2)

-a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of old command

-round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away

LONDON (3)

-I wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered Thames does flow

-in every infant's cry of fear [..] mind-forged manacles I hear.

-blights with plagues the marriage hearse

THE PRELUDE (3)

-'proud of his skill [...] with an unswerving line' compare to 'with trembling oars I turned'

-'she was an elfin pinnace' + 'like a swan' compare to 'the horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge [...] upreared its head'

-a trouble to my dreams

MY LAST DUCHESS (3)

-that's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive

-none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I

-but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together.

EXPOSURE (3)

-our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...

-all their eyes are ice

-but nothing happens

STORM ON THE ISLAND (3)

-'we are prepared: we build our houses squat [...] goodslate.' compare to last line 'it is a huge nothing that we fear'

-spits like a tame cat turned savage

-exploding comfortably

BAYONET CHARGE (4)

-the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest

-he almost stopped - In what cold clockwork oof the stars and the nations

-his terror's touchy dynamite

-a yellow hare that rolled like a flame And crawled in a threshing circle

REMAINS (3)

-I see every round as it rips through his life - I see broad daylight on the other side (contrasts with colloquial lang of first 2 stanzas)

-Sleep, and he's probably armed, possibly not. Dream, and he's torn apart by a dozen rounds.

-his bloody life in my bloody hands.

POPPIES (3)

-spasms of paper red [...] sellotape bandaged around my hand

-all my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt, slowly melting. I was brave

-the world overflowing like a treasure chest

WAR PHOTOGRAPHER (4)

-spools of suffering set out in ordered rows

-a stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost.

-reader's eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers

-he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care

TISSUE (3)

-paper that lets the light shine through

-Maps too. The sun shines through their borderlines

-with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last, of paper smoothed and stroked (repetition of line 11)

THE EMIGRÉE (3)

-I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

-it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants

-they mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight

CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (4)

-Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell

-rode the six hundred (ends first three stanzas)

-all the world wonder'd (double meaning)

-Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred! (last line)