These notes are your golden ticket to smashing the English Language GCSE, especially when it comes to the Power and Conflict cluster. Each page is crafted to simplify the complex themes, poetic techniques, and key analysis points you need to know, covering all the big hitters in the anthology. Expe...
, Contents
P3 – War Photographer
P4 – Remains
P5 - Cluster 1 PEAL table
P6 – Charge of the Light Brigade
P7 – Bayonet Charge
P8 - Exposure
P9 - Cluster 2 PEAL table
P10 - Kamikaze
P11 - Poppies
P.12 - Cluster 3 PEAL table
P.13 – Storm on the Island
P.14 - London
P.15 - Cluster 4 PEAL table
P.16 – Extract from The Prelude
P.17 - Emigree
P.18 - Cluster 5 PEAL table
P.19 - Tissue
P.20 - Ozymandias
P.21 - Cluster 6 PEAL table
P.22 – Checking out me History
P.23 – My Last Duchess
P.24 – Cluster 7 PEAL table
2
, Title War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
The poem in a nutshell….
Written in third person, the poem describes a photographer in his darkroom as he develops
prints from his latest job in the field.
As the images which slop in his trays emerge, he is filled horror at the memories of the
violent scenes he has witnessed and photographed.
His hands shake, as Duffy uses powerful imagery and effective contrast to explore not only
the conflict in war but the conflict within himself, and in the wider world of media reporting.
Written in four stanzas, each of six lines (sestet) with a regular rhyme scheme, this poem
seems to be imposing order into the chaotic world of war that the war photographer works
in.
Context
The poem comes from Duffy’s friendship with Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, two
well-respected photographers who specialised in war photography.
Duffy is fascinated by what makes someone do such a job, and how they feel about being
in situations where a choice often has to be made between recording horrific events and
helping.
3 Key Quotes
Quote Method What effect is created?
The use of sibilance highlights this image, which creates a
‘spools of suffering set out in Sibilance and suggestion of graves or bodies ‘in ordered rows’.
ordered rows’ metaphor There is also contrast in this image: ‘spools of suffering’ which
seems chaotic yet in ‘ordered rows’.
Duffy uses internal rhyme in this poem in a few places, possibly
‘tears between the bath and as a way of exploring the war photographer’s internal feelings
pre-lunch beers’ of conflict.
Internal rhyme
Here we see how, for the newspaper readers, seeing these
images only affects them for a short while and their lives
continue as normal, unlike the victims of war.
The scenes in his negatives are compared to ‘agonies’, a
‘A hundred agonies in black- powerful noun to tell us about the pain of conflict. Because
and-white’ Colour imagery they are in ‘black-and-white’ they have been made to seem
merely factual or simplified. She seems to be suggesting that
their pain is not given enough recognition.
Aspects of Power or Conflict
Conflict in war: the horrors are explored with words like ‘blood stained’, or the ‘cries’ of a wife and also the
imagery (above). But the main conflict is that of the war photographer as he grapples with what he does for a
living: ‘impassively’ photographing ‘running children’s’ ‘agonies in the ‘nightmare heat’ of war.
Poems that can be linked
Remains, which explores the haunting memories of war from the perspective of a soldier.
3
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