GCSE English AQA Poetry Guide - Power & Conflict Anthology inc. Online Edition, Audio & Quizzes: ideal for the 2024 and 2025 exams (CGP AQA GCSE Poetry)

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Blake describes a journey through London and describes the awful living conditions that the speaker sees across the city. At the start, the poem criticises the laws around ownership referring to the “charter’d Thames’ and the ‘charter’d street”. Here Blake refers to how the rich and powerful own everything in London. Blake goes on to criticise the church for not doing enough to help the poor. The final stanza discusses the horrors of prostitution and sexually transmitted disease. Form and Structure Dharker uses tissue paper as an extended metaphor for life. She examines how paper can be shaped and used to change things. There is also a reference to the thin, light paper used in religious books (particularly the Koran in this poem). Dharker also looks at our different uses for paper (receipts, money, maps and religious texts) and how these are closely linked to important things in life. Power of identity –the speaker never identified with the biased version of history he was taught. Only when he examines the past for himself does he start to understand his own identity. He feels stronger for it. Percy Shelley (1792-1822) is one of the most famous poets of all time. He was part of an influential group of poets known as The Romantics. Shelley had a pretty wild early life. He came from a very wealthy family and was in line to inherit a fortune. However, Oxford University expelled him for writing about atheism and, as a result, his father later disinherited him. At around the same time he married and eloped to the Lake District. A few years later he set off around Europe with a different woman, Mary Shelley (who would go on to write Frankenstein). Percy Shelley later drowned while on a sailing trip to Italy. Towards the end of the poem Weir introduces images of the songbird and the dove. The speaker ‘released a song bird from its cage’ as a metaphor for sending her son off to join the army and fight. Later – when the focus has shifted to the mother’s visit to the war memorial – ‘the dove pulled freely against the sky, an ornamental stitch’. This is open to interpretation and you should have a think about what your take on it is. The dove symbolises peace. Weir may be using the dove as a metaphor for the death of the son and the final peace he has found in death. Themes

Remembrance/ grieving process–poppies symbolise remembrance and the dove symbolises peace. The reader gets a clear sense of the mother’s pain and loss.Drink plenty of water to keep your brain working when you revise. Drinking water also helps to improve your concentration for revision.

To achieve high marks, you need to evidence your knowledge of the whole of the two poems in your answer, rather than just memorising and using a bank of quotations. This is because you are required to be focused on answering the question, rather than just reproducing lots of pre-learned quotes. The quality of the quotes, linked to the themes in the poems, is more important than quantity.This form holds for nine out of ten stanzas. The final stanza changes quite abruptly though to one line in length. This really emphasises the final line, ‘turned into your skin’, showing the connection between paper and skin (and therefore life). Language and imagery Simon Armitage is a famous modern poet from Yorkshire. His poetry tends to be approachable and colloquial in style. Armitage’s poetry often focuses on relationships, or personal feelings. Weir also structures the poem around personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘You’ throughout, which creates the sense that the poem is an eulogy and a collection of memories that the loving mother continuously replays in her head.