GCSE English Quotes

Question 1

Percy Shelley Ozymandias (Power) - How all power is fleeting

Answer 1

‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck’

oxymorons/juxtaposition

Question 2

Percy Shelley Ozymandias (Power) - The cruelty, oppression and corruption of those in power

Answer 2

‘sneer of cold command’

imagery
scowl of superiority, disdainful of subjects

Question 3

Percy Shelley Ozymandias (Power) - The insignificance and impotence of humans in the face of nature/time’s power

Answer 3

‘Lone and level sands stretch far away’

resolution

Question 4

Percy Shelley Ozymandias (Pride) - The danger of pride and arrogance

Answer 4

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’

symbolism

Question 5

William Blake London (Power) - The cruelty, oppression and corruption by those in power

Answer 5

‘blackning church appalls’
‘hapless soldiers sigh runs in blood down palace walls’

imagery

Question 6

William Blake London (Conflict) - Between an individual and ‘the system’; the poem is a protest against injustice

Answer 6

‘I wander through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow’

repetition
everything is owned
anti-establishment

Question 7

William Blake London (Power) - The potential power of individuals to overcome oppressive regimes

Answer 7

‘the mind-forged manacles’

metaphors
the Social Contract

Question 8

William Blake London (Loss of innocence) - The corruption of the innocent by those in power

Answer 8

‘the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s ear’

maternal power

Question 9

Seamus Heaney Storm on the Island (Conflict) - The conflict between man and the natural world

Answer 9

‘exploding comfortably’
oxymoron
‘spits like a tame cat turned savage’
simile

suddenly and unexpectedly violent and aggressive

Question 10

Seamus Heaney Storm on the Island (Power) - The insignificance and impotence of humans in the face of nature’s power

Answer 10

‘We just sit tight while wind dives and strafes invisibly’

metaphor

Question 11

Seamus Heaney Storm on the Island (Appearance vs reality)

Answer 11

‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat’
‘Strange, it is a huge nothing we fear.’

Opens with stubborn and proud statement, finishes with unsettled fear… troubles?

Question 12

Wilfred Owen Exposure (Conflict) - Between an individual and the system; the poem is a protest against injustice

Answer 12

‘What are we doing here?’
refrain
‘we cringe in holes’
imagery

Question 13

Wilfred Owen Exposure (Conflict) - The insignificance and impotence of humans in the face of nature’s power

Answer 13

‘the merciless iced east winds that knife us’
‘dawn massing in the east her melancholy army … attacks once more in shivering ranks of grey’

metaphors
personification

Question 14

Wilfred Owen Exposure (Conflict) - The psychological effects of warfare

Answer 14

‘all their eyes are ice’
‘we hear mad gusts tugging on the wire, like twitching agonies of men among its brambles’

Question 15

Ted Hughes Bayonet Charge (Conflict) - The visceral experience of fighting

Answer 15

‘Raw in raw-seamed hot khaki’

repetition/imagery
raw recruits skin rubbed raw by uniform

Question 16

Ted Hughes Bayonet Charge (Conflict) - The conflict between man and the natural world; in this poem it is man destroying nature

Answer 16

‘The shot-slashed furrows threw up a yellow hare’

imagery

Question 17

Ted Hughes Bayonet Charge (Conflict) - The psychological effects of warfare

Answer 17

‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera dropped like luxuries’

simile

Question 18

Ted Hughes Bayonet Charge (Loss of innocence) - The speaker’s realisation of the cold indifference of those in charge

Answer 18

‘In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations was he the hand pointing at that second?’

Question 19

William Wordsworth The Prelude (Power) - The insignificance and impotence of humans in the face of nature’s power

Answer 19

‘a huge peak, black and huge… upreared its head’

personification

Question 20

William Wordsworth The Prelude (Loss of innocence) - The loss of the naïve confidence of youth in the face of experience

Answer 20

‘As I rose upon the stroke my boat went heaving through the water like a swan’

‘With trembling oars I turned, and through the silent water stole my way’

Juxtaposition

Question 21

William Wordsworth The Prelude (Conflict) - The conflict between man and the natural world

Answer 21

‘no familiar shapes remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky’

Imagery

Question 22

William Wordsworth The Prelude (Trauma) - The memory if a traumatic experience haunts the speaker

Answer 22

‘huge and mighty forms that do not live… were a trouble to my dreams’