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GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Worlds and Lives Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘A Century Later’ by Imtiaz Dharker > Annotations
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‘A Century Later’ by Imtiaz Dharker

‘A Portable Paradise’ by Roger Robinson

‘A Wider View’ by Seni Seneviratne

‘England in 1819’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘In a London Drawingroom’ by George Eliot

‘Like an Heiress’ by Grace Nichols

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by William Wordsworth

‘Name Journeys’ by Raman Mundair

‘On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria’ by James Berry

‘Shall Earth no More Inspire Thee’ by Emily Brontë

‘The Jewellery Maker’ by Louisa Adjoa Parker

‘With Birds You’re Never Lonely’ by Raymond Antrobus

Key ideas to compare between poems

The school-bell is a call to battle,

every step to class, a step into the firing-line.

Here is the target, fine skin at the temple,

cheek still rounded from being fifteen.

 
 

Surrendered, surrounded, she

takes the bullet in the head

 
 

and walks on.The missile cuts

a pathway in her mind, to an orchard

in full bloom, a field humming under the sun,

its lap open and full of poppies.

 
 

This girl has won

the right to be ordinary,

 
 

wear bangles to a wedding, paint her fingernails,

go to school. Bullet, she says, you are stupid.

You have failed. You cannot kill a book

or the buzzing in it.

 
 

A murmur, a swarm. Behind her, one by one,

the schoolgirls are standing up

to take their places on the front line.

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