Power and conflict key quotes for GCSE

The Power and Conflict cluster in AQA GCSE English Literature contains 15 poems, and Paper 2 Section B asks you to compare one named poem with another of your choice. The strongest answers lean on a small bank of well-chosen quotes from every poem, not a long list of half-remembered lines. Examiners want precise quotation, embedded into your argument, with confident analysis of language, form, and context.

This guide gives you the highest-value quotes from each of the 15 poems, explains what each one shows about power or conflict, and walks through how to use them in a Grade 7+ paragraph. Memorise 3 to 5 quotes per poem and you will have enough to compare any pairing the examiners throw at you.

Paper 2 Section B is a single compulsory question worth 30 marks. Unlike the Shakespeare and Modern Texts questions, no SPaG marks are awarded on the anthology comparison. The exam paper prints one poem in full and names the theme to compare, for example: Compare how poets present the effects of conflict in Bayonet Charge and one other poem from Power and Conflict. You then pick a second poem from memory.

You have roughly 45 minutes for this question. Top-band answers sustain the comparison throughout, use sharp quotation, and analyse poetic methods with confidence. A simple way to plan is to pick three points of comparison, find a quote from each poem for each point, and write one paragraph per point.

Ozymandias presents the impermanence of human power. A traveller describes a ruined statue of a once-mighty king in the desert. The arrogance of the inscription contrasts with the empty wasteland, showing that political power cannot outlast time or nature.

Key quotes to memorise: "king of kings" (the inscription, dripping with arrogance), "sneer of cold command" (the sculptor captures the tyrant's personality), "colossal wreck" (oxymoron showing fallen power), and "the lone and level sands stretch far away" (the desert as nature's quiet victory).

London presents the abuse of power by the church, monarchy, and industry. Blake walks through the city and sees suffering at every turn. The repetition and the bleak imagery suggest that no one in power is acting to help the poor.

Key quotes: "charter'd street" (everything is owned and controlled), "mind-forg'd manacles" (the people are mentally enslaved), "every black'ning Church appalls" (religious institutions are complicit), and "the youthful Harlot's curse" (the cycle of poverty and disease).

An extract from The Prelude shows the power of nature over a young man's confidence. The speaker steals a boat at night and is humbled by a looming mountain peak. The shift from arrogance to fear is the emotional core of the poem.

Key quotes: "act of stealth and troubled pleasure" (his guilty thrill), "like a swan" (his early arrogance), "a huge peak, black and huge" (the mountain's sudden menace), and "a trouble to my dreams" (the lasting psychological effect).

My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue in which a Duke describes his late wife to a marriage broker. The reader gradually realises he had her killed for being too friendly. The poem exposes the corrupting power of male jealousy and aristocracy.

Key lines to memorise. The opening reference to his last duchess painted on the wall shows he treats her as a possession. The Duke's complaint that her heart was too soon made glad reveals his disgust at her warmth. His admission that he gave commands and all smiles stopped together is the chilling reveal. His fixation on his nine-hundred-years-old name shows his obsession with status.

Tennyson dramatises the doomed charge of British cavalry into Russian guns during the Crimean War. The poem celebrates the soldiers' courage while quietly condemning the blunder that sent them to die.

Key lines to memorise: Tennyson's admission that someone had blundered (the rare moment of criticism), the refrain that theirs is not to reason why but to do and die (the dehumanising loyalty expected of soldiers), the biblical image of riding into the valley of death, and the closing claim that all the world wondered at the soldiers' courage.

Exposure presents the slow, grinding horror of trench warfare in the First World War. The enemy in the poem is not the Germans but the weather and the boredom. Owen, who fought and died in the war, writes with bitter authority.

Key lines to memorise: Owen's image of merciless iced east winds that knive us (nature as the attacker), his haunting refrain that nothing happens, the opening confession that the soldiers' brains ache, and the bleak closing image of the burying party with picks and shovels in their shaking grasp.

Storm on the Island describes a community's preparation for and experience of a violent storm. Many readers also read it as a metaphor for the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Key quotes: "we are prepared" (the confident opening, later undercut), "wizened earth" (harsh personification of the land), "spits like a tame cat / Turned savage" (the storm's sudden violence), and "it is a huge nothing that we fear" (the paradoxical power of the invisible).

Bayonet Charge throws the reader into the chaos of a soldier going over the top. The poem questions the patriotic ideals he was sold and shows war as confusion and terror, not heroism.

Key quotes: "suddenly he awoke and was running" (the disorienting in medias res opening), "the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / sweating like molten iron" (patriotism transformed into pain), "king, honour, human dignity, etcetera / dropped like luxuries" (ideals abandoned under fire), and "a yellow hare that rolled like a flame" (innocent nature caught in the violence).

Remains is based on the testimony of a real soldier who shot a looter in Iraq and was later diagnosed with PTSD. The poem explores how the violence of war stays with people long after they come home.

Key quotes: "probably armed, possibly not" (the chilling uncertainty), "his bloody life in my bloody hands" (the double meaning of bloody), "he's here in my head when I close my eyes" (intrusive memory), and the repetition of "his bloody life in my bloody hands" near the end (the inescapable guilt).

Poppies is written from the perspective of a mother whose son has gone to war. The poem dwells on small, tender domestic details to show the personal cost of conflict on those left behind.

Key quotes: "I pinned one onto your lapel" (the intimate gesture), "Sellotape bandaged around my hand" (her preparation to let him go), "I was brave" (her quiet courage), and "hoping to hear / your playground voice catching on the wind" (the haunting final image).

War Photographer follows a photographer back in his darkroom in England, developing images from war zones. The poem contrasts the violence in the photos with the indifference of the British public.

Key quotes: "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows" (the contrast of horror and order), "a half-formed ghost" (the developing image, and the photographer's distance), "the reader's eyeballs prick / with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers" (the tepid public reaction), and "he earns his living and they do not care" (the bleak final line).

Tissue uses paper as an extended metaphor for human power, fragility, and the structures we build. Maps, religious books, and receipts are all paper, and all temporary.

Key quotes: "Paper that lets the light / shine through" (the symbol of fragility and possibility), "pages smoothed and stroked and turned / transparent with attention" (the tactile reverence for sacred texts), "If buildings were paper" (the conditional questioning power), and "turned into your skin" (the move from paper to human life).

The Emigrée is spoken by someone remembering a country they left as a child. Whatever has happened to it politically, their memory of it remains sunlit and pure. The poem shows the power of memory against oppression.

Key quotes: "There once was a country" (the fairytale opening), "It may by now be a lie, banned by the state" (acknowledging the political reality), "That child's vocabulary I carried here" (memory as an act of preservation), and "My city takes me dancing" (the personified, joyful ending).

Checking Out Me History attacks the British curriculum for teaching white European history while ignoring Black history. Agard uses non-standard spelling and contrasts the structured English history sections with celebratory free-verse sections about Black historical figures.

Key quotes: "Dem tell me" (the accusatory refrain), "Toussaint / a slave / with vision" (reclaiming a Black hero), "a healing star" (Mary Seacole), and "But now I checking out me own history / I carving out me identity" (the empowering ending).

Kamikaze tells the story of a Japanese pilot who turns back from his suicide mission and is shunned by his family for the rest of his life. The poem explores the conflict between social duty and personal survival.

Key quotes: "a one-way / journey into history" (the cultural weight of the mission), "a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous" (the beauty of the sea that calls him home), "till gradually we too learned / to be silent" (the family's complicity in his exile), and "he must have wondered / which had been the better way to die" (the devastating final line).

Top-band answers embed quotes inside sentences, zoom in on one or two words, and link the analysis to the poet's wider purpose. Long quotes copied off the page without analysis are wasted ink.

A reliable structure is point, evidence, analysis, link. State your point, give a short quote, analyse a specific word or technique, then link to the other poem you are comparing. Repeat for three paragraphs and you have a strong essay.

Examiner reports flag the same problems year after year. Most are about quoting carelessly or forgetting to compare. Knowing the quotes is not enough on its own; you have to use them well.