There are fifteen poems in the GCSE Power & Conflict anthology.

For your exam, you will be given one poem in full, printed on the page, and you will be asked to compare this poem to another from the anthology.

All of the GCSE English Literature course is closed-book, meaning that you will need to learn at least three lines from each poem.

It is possible to get top marks for this question by making sure that you know the following:

• What the poem is about

• What the poem means

• The methods the poet uses to convey their message

• The links between the ideas of other poems in the anthology

Synposis

Whatever the question is, it is important that you understand what the poem is about. This will support you in adapting your argument to fit the focus of the question. This section includes:

• A general overview of the poem

• A detailed look at the poem line-by-line

• Analysis of the poem, giving Carol Ann Duffy’s intention and message

A General Overview of the Poem

War Photographer explores the balance between duty and the moral imperative, with a professional whose job depends on detachment from the latter. The speaker, a war photographer, details his lifestyle when out of war zones, developing his photographs, reflecting on the nature of his role. The poem explores the nature of shame at the human level.

Line-by-Line

In his darkroom 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.

The poem opens with a clear suggestion that the “darkroom” is a haven: where a photographer can be “finally alone” to reflect. Immediately, the noun phrase “spools of suffering” connects his photography to its subject; the pain of others is his milieu. An attempt to contain this comes in the adverbial “set out in ordered rows”, but it is lightweight and insufficient.

The “softly glow[ing]” light and references to religious ceremony (“church”, “priest”, “Mass” – and the Biblical reference “All flesh is grass” meaning life is fleeting) lend the scene a sense of occasion and moral authority. It is short-lived, however, as we consider the verb choice “intone”, which serves to strip the delivery of necessary emotion, and the whistlestop tour of warzones from the past 30 years serves to flatten their significance. Nothing is given its due attention and respect by the photographer doing his job in this first stanza.

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.

In the second stanza, the central apologism of the poem is made explicit: that he “has a job to do”. Still, the impact of what he has seen is starting to take effect: hands “trembl[ing] now”, as he recalls “explo[sions] beneath the feet” and “running children in a nightmare heat”. These stirring images are contrasted with the familiarity of “Home” – “Rural England”, with its “simple weather”, its “ordinary pain” and the “fields which don’t explode”. Clearly, he is safe now, but the images bring up emotions that he perhaps suppressed at the time of capture (“his hands [...] did not tremble then”). Despite all of this recognition of the horror, and his own (somewhat unjust) safe removal from it, the opening sentence of the stanza is what sticks: “He has a job to do.” 

In spite of the tight rhyme scheme that is maintained, this stanza’s combined use of caesura and enjambement serves to fragment the discourse, as if the incompatibility of the photographer’s duty-bound safety and the terrified children he photographed (and left behind to the “nightmare” world) fractures the lineation itself.

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.

The next stanza signals the arrival of conflict immediately: “Something is happening.” The enigmatic pronoun “Something” soon becomes “A stranger’s features [that] twist” in a photo, evoking an inevitably stirring memory in the photographer. The ability of photographs to stir emotion in the photographer himself seems to be a tacit endorsement of his job. Next, the vague scene is not clearly delineated, but is nevertheless peppered with strong emotions (“features [...] twist[ing]”, “a half-formed ghost”, “cries / of [a] man’s wife”, “blood stained into foreign dust”). 

Somehow, though, the photographer frames himself as the central figure: “how he sought approval / without words to do what someone must”. He is not painted in a good light, here, with his focus on justifying his detachment and commitment to documenting. Whilst he “s[eeks] approval”, he is doing it “without words” and would evidently proceed without such approval because “someone must”. He may be correct that “someone must” record these events (hence the existence of his job), but asserting this in the same breath as a depiction of pain feels uncomfortable.

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.

The final stanza begins by multiplying the scene (an “agon[y]”) from the previous stanza by “A hundred”. His photographs are “agonies in black-and-white” in enormous number. The fact that it is “his editor” who will “pick out five or six” for the “Sunday[...] supplement” which the “reader[...]” will view is striking in the distance it creates. We have the event itself, filtered through the camera/photographer, rendered black-and-white, curated by the editor, printed and viewed on paper – a million miles from the point of origin. Whilst this could be an argument for doing the work in the first place (to make such views possible for the English Sunday supplement readers), it is also a reminder of the distance from any real suffering of any English, who can read it between the “bath and pre-lunch beers” with their privileged safety.

Even the intended effect of the work (stirring the general public) is undermined by the language used to address it: how the “reader’s eyeballs prick / with tears”. It is the only point in the poem where the rhyme scheme falters (it does not rhyme with “six”) and this, coupled with the enjambing “with tears” and the adverbial “between the bath and pre-lunch beers”, serves to call such a reaction into question. This cynicism is made explicit in the final line: “they do not care”. Crucially, the war photographer subtly inculpates himself, equating his “earn[ing] his living” with “the[ir] not car[ing]”, in this final assertion. His whole career is questionable.

Writer’s Methods

This section aims to support your revision by providing you with concrete and clear examples of methods that Carol Ann Duffy uses. 

Remember: methods support meaning, not the other way round. You will gain more marks focusing your essays on the big ideas of the poems and then supporting these ideas with the methods that the writer uses.

Form

The poem is broken into four stanzas of equal length. It is briefly end-stopping, in lieu of initial capitalisation, but soon abandons this for a more enjambement- and caesura-heavy style that is more akin to prose, consistent with the modern and human-centred nature of the poem. The rhyme scheme, in contrast with the relatively frenetic lineation, is consistent: abbcdd. Save for one inconsistency, this rigorous rhyme scheme and consistency of stanza length imposes some sense of artificial order onto the distressing nature of the content (rather like the photographer’s photos do to the warzones).

Structure

The stanza divisions are fairly arbitrary, towing the line of neither narrative nor thematic distinctions. The first three-and-a-half stanzas appear to take place in the darkroom, the last two lines on the aeroplane. Each stanza deals with some juxtaposition of the safety of home and the horrors of warfare in action. In the middle two stanzas, there is apologism for the work; in the last, there is a tacit acknowledgement of its futility. The only real structural solidity in the content is how it opens with a geographical orientation and ends with a conclusive summary of the meaning of it all. Such chaotic structure is at odds with the neatness of the visual structure. Again, this may be fairly tied to the photographer’s effort to impose order on the chaos he sees when making his photographs.

Language

There are two fundamental semantic fields in the poem: the horror of war and the comfort of home. (The semantic field of photography – “darkroom”, “spools”, “red [light]”, “Solutions”, “black-and-white” – is largely incidental.) The horror of war is captured in proper nouns synonymous with warzones (“Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh.”) as well as vague images of suffering (“explode”, “nightmare”, “cries”, “blood”, “agonies”) against the backdrop of distant lands (“fields”, “heat”, “foreign dust”). Home, contrastingly, is captured in comforting ideals and images (“Rural”, “Home”, “simple weather”, “bath”, “beers”). The effect is one of stark contrast, driving the poem’s central idea home.

Context

At MyEdSpace, we use this analogy to discuss context – ketchup, salt and chips.

If you ordered a portion of chips, and asked for salt, you wouldn’t then dump the salt into the corner of your chips and start dipping each individual chip into the salt. 

When you put salt on your chips, you sprinkle it over, sparingly, so as to give a good coverage of salt across the chips as a whole. Context is just like salt on chips. 

Context is not ketchup – because it would be appropriate to squeeze ketchup into the corner of your plate and dip each chip in (and in fact, that is advised).

So when you’re including contextual information in your essays, sprinkle it across the essay, just like you sprinkle salt on your chips.

Let’s link the context to the key ideas and themes of the poem.

Biographical/Publication Insight

Carol Ann Duffy, poet Laureate from 2009-2019, wrote this piece for her inaugural poetry collection, ‘Standing Female Nude’ (1985), in which she explored the inner working lives of often marginalised figures.

Specific International Background

In the ‘80s, there was growing criticism of the West’s detachment from conflicts elsewhere in the world, and photojournalists had become emblematic of a society which engaged with distant wars only in passing, as observers – including The Troubles, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Khmer Rouge regime and its associated genocide, all of which are alluded to in the poem’s first stanza.

Comparison

You are required to write an essay in your exam that is a comparison of the ideas and themes explored in two poems from the Power & Conflict anthology. Therefore, it is very important to revise the poems in pairs and to enter the exam with an idea of what poem you will choose to compare once you know what the named poem is.

War Photographer and Remains 

Both poems explore the impact of war on those uninjured by the conflict, but very much involved and culpable. Both poems have speakers who attempt to justify their behaviour in the war zone whilst managing their own shame. However, War Photographer focuses on the guilt associated with making a living out of a kind of exploitation of those directly affected by war, whilst Remains focuses on the processing of guilt that comes from an actual murder within the role as a keeper of the peace.

Similarity:

Both poems depict attempts to justify their behaviour and shrink their responsibility.

Evidence and Analysis 

Duffy’s poem conveys a photographer whose emotional detachment from his work is a necessary contributor to its success. He justifies his “impassive[ness]” with the apologism of “ha[ving] a job to do”, returning home to where “simple weather can dispel” any emotional pain. There is candour, admitting to being impassive, balanced uncomfortably with an attempt to mitigate his shame, creating a sense of emotional instability which unsettles the reader.

Armitage’s poem presents a soldier whose shame around killing a looter has evidently led him to resolve cognitive dissonance by spreading responsibility among peers. The speaker dwells on the collective responsibility for the shooting (“we”, “myself and somebody else and somebody else”, “all three of us”, etc.) instead of the reality that is the “blood[ on his] hands” that is only ever acknowledged in the final line. The use of plural pronouns (“we”, “us”, etc.) shows an (understandable) unwillingness to face responsibility for murder.

Difference:

The poets present different extents of culpability relative to the severity of the respective speaker’s moral transgression.

Evidence and Analysis 

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, the speaker’s engagement with war is indirect and thus more excusable than a soldier’s.

In her poem, the photographer engages with war as a documentarian, not a killer, and so his apologism is more tolerable to the reader’s sensibility – albeit only somewhat. The speaker opines that the war photographer “has a job to do” and it is doing “what someone must”. At the same time, he acknowledges the suffering (“running children in a nightmare heat”) and his immunity to it (“fields which don’t explode”). The sense of obligation, coupled with the humanity expressed, as well as the resentment (“they do not care”), paint the war photographer in a slightly better light.

Contrastingly, Simon Armitage’s speaker is directly culpable for murder.

In his poem, the speaker has literally killed somebody, and as such the imagery is brutal and the trauma response extreme. The event itself is narrated with moments of visceral declarations, like bullets “rip[ping] through [the looter’s] life”, the victim being “sort of inside out”, and how his “guts” are “tosse[d] back into his body” – and the aftermath comes back to him with force: “he bursts again” into the speaker’s head and is “torn apart by a dozen rounds”. The verbs, “rips”, “tosses”, “bursts”, “torn apart”, are all stirringly violent, showing the extent of the trauma.