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Master all 15 poems in the AQA Power and Conflict anthology. Each study page includes annotations, key quotes, context, and comparison notes to help you write top-grade essays.
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Eight of these fifteen poems remain in copyright — Heaney’s Storm on the Island, Hughes’s Bayonet Charge and Armitage’s Remains (© Faber & Faber), Duffy’s War Photographer (© Picador / Pan Macmillan and Rogers Coleridge & White), Weir’s Poppies (© Templar Poetry), Garland’s Kamikaze (© Enitharmon Press), Dharker’s Tissue and Rumens’s The Émigrée (© Bloodaxe Books), and Agard’s Checking Out Me History (© Hodder). Quotations on individual set-text pages are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA 1988 §30 (criticism, review, quotation). For full text, students should consult the board-licensed AQA Anthology of Poetry (school edition).
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A shattered statue in the desert reveals the futility of power.
William Wordsworth
A stolen boat ride becomes a terrifying encounter with nature.
Seamus Heaney
An island community braces against the relentless force of a storm.
Robert Browning
A duke reveals his chilling control over his late wife.
William Blake
A walk through London exposes suffering and institutional oppression.
John Agard
A powerful challenge to a colonial curriculum that silenced his heritage.
Imtiaz Dharker
Paper becomes a metaphor for the fragile structures humans build.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Six hundred soldiers ride into certain death with unwavering duty.
Wilfred Owen
Soldiers slowly freeze to death while nothing happens at the front.
Ted Hughes
A soldier charges across no-man's-land in raw, terrifying detail.
Simon Armitage
A soldier cannot escape the memory of a man he shot.
Jane Weir
A mother tenderly remembers her son leaving for war.
Carol Ann Duffy
A photographer develops images that will never convey the truth.
Beatrice Garland
A pilot turns back from his mission and faces a lifetime of shame.
The exam asks you to compare two poems. Choose poems that share a theme but differ in perspective -- for example, compare Exposure (soldier's suffering) with The Charge of the Light Brigade (glorification of duty).
Markers reward thematic analysis. Instead of writing "both poems are about war", explore how each poet presents the effects of conflict differently -- one through guilt, the other through loss.
Top-band responses compare how poets use language, structure, and form. Notice how Owen uses half-rhyme to create unease, while Tennyson uses repetition to build momentum.
You don't need to memorise entire poems. Focus on short, technique-rich quotes you can analyse in depth. Each poem study page highlights the most important quotations.
Head back to the Poetry hub to explore the AQA Love and Relationships anthology, the AQA Worlds and Lives anthology, and unseen poetry techniques.
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