English Literature

Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)

Professor QuillPoetry18 cardsFree · no account needed

AQAWritten against AQA GCSE English Literature (8702): 3.2.2 Poetry: Power and Conflict. AQA has not reviewed these cards.

Answer in your head, then tap to check. Slide or use the buttons to grade.

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

⌨ Type the answerAnswer in your head…What form of poem is Ozymandias? (one word)

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0001Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

sonnet

HintCount the lines: there are fourteen.

The whyIt does not keep to either of the standard sonnet rhyme schemes. One reading is that the broken pattern suits a poem about a broken statue.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0001Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapAnswer in your head…The words on the pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, king of ____”.

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0002Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

kings

HintHe claims to rule over all other rulers.

The whyThe boast survives; the kingdom does not. The statue's inscription is the only place where the king still speaks.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0002Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapsAnswer in your head…The inscription continues: “Look on my works, ye ____, and ____!”

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0003Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Mighty; despair

HintHe addresses other powerful people and tells them how they should feel.

The whyHe meant: despair of ever matching me. Now that nothing is left, the line means something else: despair, because this is what becomes of all power. The irony is the heart of the poem.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0003Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapAnswer in your head…Straight after the boast comes the shortest sentence in the poem: “Nothing beside ____.”

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0004Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

remains

HintA verb meaning is left; as a noun it can mean ruins or a dead body.

The whyThe flat three-word sentence answers the grand inscription. The poem then ends on “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0004Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…Ozymandias is a Greek name for a real ruler. Of which country was he a pharaoh?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0005Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Egypt

HintThe statue stands in a desert in North Africa.

The whyHe is Ramesses II. Shelley began the poem in 1817, when part of a huge statue of that pharaoh was expected in Britain, and published it in 1818.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0005Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…The speaker of Ozymandias has not seen the statue himself. Who describes it to him?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0006Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

A traveller “from an antique land”

HintSomeone the speaker met.

The whyThe king's power reaches us third-hand: through the sculptor, then the traveller, then the speaker. Each step makes Ozymandias smaller and further away.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0006Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapAnswer in your head…From the second stanza of London: “The mind-forged ____ I hear”.

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0007Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

manacles

HintMetal cuffs that fasten a prisoner's wrists.

The whyThey are made in the mind: people are held down by ways of thinking as well as by laws. Blake's own spelling is mind-forg'd; some editions modernise it.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0007Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…In the first stanza both the street and the River Thames are called “chartered”. What does the repeated word suggest?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0008Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

That everything in the city, even the river, is owned and controlled

HintA charter was a legal document granting rights or ownership.

The whyA river should be free. In this city nature itself has been mapped and licensed by those with power.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0008Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapsAnswer in your head…What the speaker sees in every face he meets: “Marks of ____, marks of ____.”

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0009Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

weakness; woe

HintTwo w words: one for lack of strength, one for deep sorrow.

The whyThe word “mark” comes three times in two lines, and the repetition makes the suffering feel stamped on everyone. In the anthology's text the first of the three is a verb, meaning to notice.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0009Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…In the third stanza a chimney-sweeper's cry and a soldier's sigh are each set against a building. Which two institutions do the buildings stand for?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0010Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

The Church and the monarchy

HintOne stands for religion, the other for the state.

The whyThe cry “Every blackening church appals” and the sigh “Runs in blood down palace-walls”. Blake holds those in power answerable for the suffering in the streets.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0010Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…The poem's last two words are “marriage hearse”. Why is the phrase so jarring?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0011Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

It joins a wedding to a funeral: a beginning to a death

HintA hearse carries a coffin.

The whyPutting two opposed ideas side by side like this is an oxymoron. Blake suggests that the city's misery poisons even love and new life.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0011Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

⌨ Type the answerAnswer in your head…London comes from Blake's collection Songs of Experience. In which year was it published? (year, four digits)

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0012Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

1794

HintFive years after the French Revolution began.

The whyThe Songs of Experience answer his earlier Songs of Innocence. London is one of its angriest poems, written when revolution abroad had made the British government nervous of dissent.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0012Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…At the start of the extract from The Prelude, what does the boy do one summer evening?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0013Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

He takes a small boat that is not his and rows out on the lake

HintHe finds it tied to a willow tree.

The whyHe calls it “an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure”: he knows he is doing wrong, and enjoys it uneasily.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0013Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…The boy says he found the boat “(led by her)”. Who or what is “her”?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0014Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Nature

HintWordsworth treats it as a guide and teacher throughout the poem.

The whyNature is personified as a female presence who leads the boy to the experience and then teaches him a lesson through it.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0014Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapAnswer in your head…What rises up behind the ridge as the boy rows: “a huge peak, black and ____”.

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0015Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

huge

HintThe poet reaches for an adjective and can only find one he has just used.

The whyRepeating the plain word suggests that the boy has run out of language for what he sees. The peak seems to grow and to come after him “like a living thing”.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0015Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…At first the boat moves “like a swan”. How does the boy row back to the shore?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0016Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

“With trembling oars”: frightened and shaken

HintHis confidence has gone.

The whyThe extract turns at the moment the peak appears. Before it the boy is proud of his skill; after it he steals back to the mooring place.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0016Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Fill the gapAnswer in your head…How the experience stays with him afterwards: “There hung a darkness, call it ____ / Or blank desertion.”

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0017Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

solitude

HintThe state of being alone.

The whyFor many days his mind is filled with “huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men”. Nature has shown him a power far beyond his own.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0017Back

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Answer in your head…The Prelude has no rhyme and, in this extract, no breaks into stanzas. What is its verse form called?

Tap to check

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0018Front

English Literature · Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)Professor Quill

Blank verse

HintUnrhymed lines of ten syllables.

The whyThe Prelude is a very long poem about the growth of the poet's own mind. The unbroken, flowing verse suits a memory told in one breath.

★ GCSE-ENLI-POE-0018Back

Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)

18 cards

0Got it

0Tricky

18Skipped

Adopt into my sky No account yet? See plans

More English Literature decks

← All 474 decks

Where this deck sitsRead all 18 cards as text

Where Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option) sits on the curriculum map

3 points on the English Literature map, across Y11. The faint stars are the rest of the subject — this deck is the lit part.

Open the GCSE map →

Positional, never a mastery claim — the map shows where these cards live, not what your child has learned.

Keep what you learn

Here, nothing is saved. In your child’s own sky every card is scheduled — it comes back just before they’d forget it — and the professor who wrote it is one tap away.

Adopt into my sky No account yet? See plans