Best Words
Post 1914 Poetry
Online Poetry Tests
Poetry is the best words in the best order...
In your GCSE Literature exam, you will have a choice of questions on the post 1914 poems in the Best Words poetry book.
Here, you can test your knowledge of the language features and poetic techniques of the poems in this section. Select a poem, read it through and then follow the link to take the test. Try to identify why key words have been highlighted. You'll recieve a score at the end of each test which will give some indication of how well you know the poems. Good luck!
Choose a poem:
Long Distance | I Shall Return | War Photographer
by Tony Harrison
Though my mother was already two
years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn’t just drop in. You
had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn’t risk my blight of
disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief .
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.
I believe life ends with death, and
that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and
the disconnected number I still call.
by Claude McKay
I shall return again. I shall return
To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes
At golden noon the forest fires burn
Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.
I shall return to loiter by streams
That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,
And realise once more my thousand dreams
Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife
Of village dances, dear delicious tunes
That stir the hidden depths of native life,
Stray melodies of dim-remembered tunes.
I shall return. I shall return again
To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.
by Carol Ann Duffy
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.
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.
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.
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 bath and pre-lunch beers.
From aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns a living and they do not care.
Take
the test
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