Poetry – Conflict Poems

1. Poetry – Conflict Poems List all the conflict poems from the anthology. You may wish to split these into categories - Experiences of war: Effects of war: 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

2. Poetry – Conflict Poems Experiences of war: Tissue Charge of the Light Brigade Bayonet Charge Effects of war: Kamikaze Remains Poppies The Emigree War Photographer 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

3. ImtiazDharker - Tissue Fine slips from grocery shops that say how much was sold and what was paid by credit card might fly our lives like paper kites. An architect could use all this, place layer over layer, luminous script over numbers over line, and never wish to build again with brick or block, but let the daylight break through capitals and monoliths, through the shapes that pride can make, find a way to trace a grand design with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last, of paper smoothed and stroked and thinned to be transparent, turned into your skin. Paper that lets the lightshine through, thisis what could alter things.Paper thinned by age or touching, the kind you find in well-used books,the back of the Koran, where a handhas written in the names and histories,who was born to whom, the height and weight, who died where and how, on which sepia date,pages smoothed and stroked and turnedtransparent with attention. If buildings were paper, I mightfeel their drift, see how easilythey fall away on a sigh, a shiftin the direction of the wind. Maps too. The sun shines through their borderlines, the marks that rivers make, roads, railtracks, mountainfolds, 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

4. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Tissue Context • ImtiazDharker has Pakistani origins and was raised in Glasgow. A great number of her poems look at issues such as religion, terrorism and global politics/identity. Key Meaning • The poem is written from the point of view of someone today looking out at the conflict and troubles of the modern world; destruction, war and politics, money and wealth as well as issues like terrorism and identity. The poem remarks how nothing is meant to last, that it would be better not to hold too tightly to that and instead we should be willing to let go and pass things on in their time to be remade. In short, that the world would be better if it shared more qualities with ‘tissue’. • The poem looks at conflict in terms of destruction and politics. It hints that we make our own conflict by holding on too tight to power and control. The poem remarks how nothing is meant to last, and calls in to question things (structures, rules, borders) that the human race attribute meaning to. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

5. Lord Alfred Tennyson – Charge of the Light Brigade 1. Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward,All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred."Forward, the Light Brigade!"Charge for the guns!" he said:Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. 2. "Forward, the Light Brigade!"Was there a man dismay'd?Not tho' the soldier knew Someone had blunder'd:Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die:Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. 3. Cannon to right of them,Cannon to left of them,Cannon in front of themVolley'd and thunder'd;Storm'd at with shot and shell,Boldly they rode and well,Into the jaws of Death,Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred. 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

6. 5. Cannon to right of them,Cannon to left of them,Cannon behind themVolley'd and thunder'd;Storm'd at with shot and shell,While horse and hero fell,They that had fought so wellCame thro' the jaws of DeathBack from the mouth of Hell,All that was left of them, Left of six hundred. 6. When can their glory fade?O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered.Honor the charge they made,Honor the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred. 4. Flash'd all their sabres bare,Flash'd as they turn'd in air,Sabring the gunners there,Charging an army, while All the world wonder'd:Plunged in the battery-smokeRight thro' the line they broke;Cossack and RussianReel'd from the sabre strokeShatter'd and sunder'd.Then they rode back, but not Not the six hundred. 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

7. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Charge of the Light Brigade Context • Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of 11 children born to an upper-middle class country vicar. He received a good literary education. • The Crimean War was fought between Britain and Imperial Russia from 1853-1856. For the first time in history, newspapers carried eye-witness reports as well as detailing not just the triumphs of war but the mistakes and horrors as well. • The poem is about theBattle of Balaclava. An order given to the British army's cavalry division (known as the Light Brigade) was misunderstood and 600 cavalrymen ended charging down a narrow valley straight into the fire of Russian cannons. Over 150 British soldiers were killed, and more than 120 were wounded. At home the news of the disaster was a sensation and the nation began to question the politicians and generals who led them. Key Meaning • The poem creates national heroes for Britain, and criticises those in charge. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

8. Ted Hughes – Bayonet Charge Suddenly he awoke and was running – rawIn raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy,Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedgeThat dazzled with rifle fire, hearingBullets smacking the belly out of the air –He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm;The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eyeSweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest, – In bewilderment then he almost stopped –In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nationsWas he the hand pointing that second? He was runningLike a man who has jumped up in the dark and runsListening between his footfalls for the reasonOf his still running, and his foot hung likeStatuary in mid-stride. Then the shot-slashed furrows Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flameAnd crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wideOpen silent, its eyes standing out.He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge,King, honour, human dignity, etceteraDropped like luxuries in a yelling alarmTo get out of that blue crackling airHis terror’s touchy dynamite. 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

9. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Bayonet Charge Context • Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the countryside. Served in the RAF for two years • he studied Archaeology and Anthropology so the themes of the countryside, human history and mythology deeply influenced his imagination Key Meaning • The poem describes how fighting enemiestransforms a solider from a living thinking person into a dangerous weapon of war. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

10. Simon Armitage – Remains On another occasion, we got sent out to tackle looters raiding a bank. And one of them legs it up the road, probably armed, possibly not. Well myself and somebody else are all of the same mind, so all three of us open fire. Three of a kind, all letting fly, and I swear I see every round as it rips through his life – I see broad daylight on the other side. So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times and he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

11. Pain itself, the image of agony. One of my mates goes by And tosses his guts back in to his body. Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry. End of story, except not really. His blood-shadow stays in the street, and put on patrol I walk right over it week after week. Then I’m home on leave. But I blink And he bursts again through the doors of the bank. Sleep, and he’s probably armed, possibly not. Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds. And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out – He’s here in my head when I close my eyes, Dug in behind enemy lines, Not left for dead in some distant, star-stunned, sand-smothered land Or six-feet-under in desert sand, But near to the knuckle, here and now, His bloody life in my bloody hands 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

12. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Remains Context • The poem is written from the perspective of a soldier stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan (or any warzone really). The poem explores Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – soldiers struggling to mentally come to terms with experiences from war - memories often leave the sufferer with nightmares, panic attacks, depression and suicidal tendencies. • Simon Armitage is a famous UK poet who is known for being very direct in his work. His recent poems have looked at the experiences of war and soldiers. Key Meaning • Explores mental health and the long-term effects of war. • Questions morality and war. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

13. Jane Weir - Poppies slowly melting. I was brave, as I walkedwith you, to the front door, threwit open, the world overflowinglike a treasure chest. A split secondand you were away, intoxicated.After you'd gone I went into your bedroom,released a song bird from its cage.Later a single dove flew from the pear tree,and this is where it has led me,skirting the church yard walls, my stomach busymaking tucks, darts, pleats, hat-less, withouta winter coat or reinforcements of scarf, gloves.On reaching the top of the hill I tracedthe inscriptions on the war memorial,leaned against it like a wishbone.The dove pulled freely against the sky,an ornamental stitch. I listened, hoping to hearyour playground voice catching on the wind. Three days before Armistice Sundayand poppies had already been placedon individual war graves. Before you left,I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals,spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockadeof yellow bias binding around your blazer.Sellotape bandaged around my hand,I rounded up as many white cat hairsas I could, smoothed down your shirt'supturned collar, steeled the softeningof my face. I wanted to graze my noseacross the tip of your nose, play atbeing Eskimos like we did whenyou were little. I resisted the impulseto run my fingers through the gelledblackthorns of your hair. All my wordsflattened, rolled, turned into felt, 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

14. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Poppies Context • The poem is set in the present day but reaches right back to the beginning of the Poppy Day tradition. Armistice Sunday began as a way of marking the end of the First World War in 1918 so people could remember the thousands of ordinary men who had been killed in the First World War. Today, the event is used to remember soldiers of all wars who have died since then. Key Meaning • about the nature of grief. The mother is speaking directly to her son, but a son who shifts in time as if the present holds too much pain and her memories can only be expressed if distanced in imagery held safely in the past. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

15. Carol Ann Duffy – War Photographer Something is happening. A stranger’s features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries of this man’s wife, how he sought approval without words to do what someone must and how the blood stained into foreign dust. A hundred agonies in black and white from which his editor will pick out five or six for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers. From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care. In his dark room he is finally alone with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows. The only light is red and softly glows, as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass. Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass. He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to now. Rural England. Home again to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat. 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

16. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions War Photographer Context • The poem is also looking at the contrast between the war zones and safety of being back home and the way people just do not understand the truth, after all a single photo cannot show everything. • War photographers do a very dangerous job, many are killed and injured, as they must get in harms way to get the photos they are after. Key Meaning • Emphasises how out of touch we are with war and suffering in warzones – too easy to distance ourselves. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

17. Carol Rumens – The Emigree There once was a country… I left it as a childbut my memory of it is sunlight-clearfor it seems I never saw it in that Novemberwhich, I am told, comes to the mildest city.The worst news I receive of it cannot breakmy original view, the bright, filled paperweight.It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,but I am branded by an impression of sunlight. The white streets of that city, the graceful slopesglow even clearer as time rolls its tanksand the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.That child’s vocabulary I carried herelike a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.It may by now be a lie, banned by the statebut I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight. I have no passport, there’s no way back at allbut my city comes to me in its own white plane.It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.My city takes me dancing through the cityof walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.They accuse me of being dark in their free city.My city hides behind me. They mutter death,and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight. 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

18. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions The Emigree Context • An emigrée is usually the term for someone who has to leave a country for political or social reasons. • The poet bases many of the ideas on modern examples of emigration from countries like Russia or the Middle East where people are fleeing corruption and tyranny, or those countries change in their absence to some from of dictatorship. Key Meaning • deep sense of conflict in terms of emotions and memory; the poet is torn between her childhood memory and her adult understanding. Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

19. Beatrice Garland - Kamikaze and beneath them, arcing in swatheslike a huge flag waved first one waythen the other in a figure of eight,the dark shoals of fishesflashing silver as their belliesswivelled towards the sun and remembered how heand his brothers waiting on the shorebuilt cairns of pearl-grey pebblesto see whose withstood longest the turbulent inrush of breakersbringing their father’s boat safe Her father embarked at sunrisewith a flask of water, a samurai swordin the cockpit, a shaven headfull of powerful incantationsand enough fuel for a one-wayjourney into history but half way there, she thought,recounting it later to her children,he must have looked far downat the little fishing boatsstrung out like buntingon a green-blue translucent sea 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

20. till gradually we too learnedto be silent, to live as thoughhe had never returned, that thiswas no longer the father we loved.And sometimes, she said, he must have wonderedwhich had been the better way to die. – yes, grandfather’s boat – safeto the shore, salt-sodden, awashwith cloud-marked mackerel,black crabs, feathery prawns,the loose silver of whitebait and oncea tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous. And though he came backmy mother never spoke againin his presence, nor did she meet his eyesand the neighbours too, they treated himas though he no longer existed,only we children still chattered and laughed 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration

21. Look for: • Structure/form • Language techniques and IMPACT • Poet’s intentions Kamikaze Context • Towards the end of WWII, Japan was losing the war against American forces who were advancing towards the Japanese home islands. To defend, a special unit of the Japanese air force was formed, known as kamikaze pilots - their sole purpose to deliberately crash their planes in to American warships. Kamikaze pilots were on suicide missions, and their sacrifice was seen as both a religious and patriotic obligation. Key Meaning • Questions war and patriotism – should life ever be sacrificed? Key lines Alongside your quotes, LEARN annotations when you revise ready to slot into your exam responses! 5 – clear understanding6/7 – thoughtful, developed consideration8/9 – Convincing, critical analysis and exploration