Poetry, Year 11: Poppies and War Photographer (Power and Conflict option)

A parent, almost always read as a mother, whose child has left home, apparently for the army

HintNot a soldier.

The whyThe poem shows conflict from the side of those left behind. It never says outright that the speaker is a woman or that the child has gone to war.

The speaker's absent child, spoken to as you throughout

HintThe poem reads like one side of a conversation.

The whySpeaking directly to him makes the poem intimate. He never answers, which is part of the loss.

Armistice Sunday

HintIts name joins the word for the 1918 ceasefire to a day of the week.

The whyThe poem opens with the parent fastening a paper poppy to the child's jacket. The public act of remembering the war dead is set beside one private goodbye.

At a memorial to the war dead, beside a churchyard

HintA place where names are carved.

The whyShe has followed a dove there. She listens, hoping to catch the child's voice as it sounded years ago at school. Whether the child has died or simply left is not made clear.

Carol Ann Duffy

HintShe became Poet Laureate in 2009.

The whyBritish soldiers were then dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weir chose to write about a mother, a voice war poetry had rarely given room to.

In a darkroom at home in England, developing his pictures

HintA room lit by a red lamp.

The whyHe is alone and safe, far from the places he photographed. The quiet of the room lets the memories come back.

A priest getting ready for a church service

HintThe darkroom is treated as a holy place.

The whyThe comparison makes his work a solemn duty to the dead. He lays out his reels of film in neat lines, with the care of a ritual.

Regular: four stanzas of six lines each, with a fixed rhyme pattern

HintCount them; they match.

The whyOne reading is that the tidy form matches the way he puts chaos into order, as his neat lines of film do. The horror is held inside a neat frame, like a photograph.

Choose just a handful to print in a weekend supplement

HintMost will never be seen.

The whyRoll after roll of suffering is cut down to a few images chosen to suit a magazine. The poem is critical of the trade as well as of the readers.

They will be moved for a moment and then go back to their comfortable day

HintIt happens between one weekend routine and the next.

The whyThe poem ends with him in the air again, looking down on a homeland he feels is indifferent. Duffy's target is the comfort of people who look and move on.

1985

HintIn the middle of the 1980s.

The whyCarol Ann Duffy was later Poet Laureate, from 2009 to 2019. The poem names three cities known for conflict in those years, one of them in the United Kingdom.