Poetry and character revision sheets

Macbeth — Act 1

Loyalty, temptation and choice: six key quotations, scene-by-scene development and close analysis.

Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth tries to make conscience and compassion disappear. The return of blood and hand imagery exposes the limits of that imagined control.

Banquo

Banquo offers an alternative response to temptation. His caution exposes Macbeth’s choices, while his own interest in the prophecy prevents an entirely simple contrast.

Macduff

Macduff connects national duty to personal feeling. His grief challenges the idea that masculinity depends on suppressing emotion.

Duncan

Duncan embodies generous authority but repeatedly misreads loyalty. His vulnerability makes Macbeth’s betrayal both political and intimate.

Malcolm

Malcolm learns caution in a court where appearances deceive. His return offers political repair after Macbeth’s rule.

The witches

The witches create temptation and uncertainty. Their partial truths become dangerous when Macbeth turns them into guarantees.

Lady Macduff

Lady Macduff gives political violence a domestic setting. Her criticism reveals the cost of resistance for people left vulnerable.

Ebenezer Scrooge

Dickens makes redemption visible through changed relationships and practical care. Feeling differently matters because Scrooge begins to behave differently.

Jacob Marley

Marley shows what recognition looks like when it arrives too late. His warning gives Scrooge the opportunity he no longer has.

Ghost of Christmas Past

The first spirit makes remembering an active moral experience. It shows Scrooge both wounds and alternatives to the life he chose.

Ghost of Christmas Present

The second spirit links abundant celebration to urgent responsibility. Its warmth makes the exposure of neglected children more unsettling.

Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

The last spirit makes Scrooge interpret the consequences of a life without affection. Its silence places pressure on him to recognise himself and choose.

Bob Cratchit

Bob’s warmth exposes Scrooge’s cold use of authority. His family’s vulnerability connects an employer’s decisions to life beyond the workplace.

Tiny Tim

Tiny Tim gives social neglect an individual human cost. His generosity of feeling challenges Scrooge’s assumption that poverty measures human worth.

Mrs Cratchit

Mrs Cratchit combines practical affection with anger at unfair treatment. Her voice keeps the family’s warmth from excusing Scrooge’s behaviour.

Fred

Fred presents belonging as an offer made before it is earned. His steady generosity provides an alternative to Scrooge’s isolation.

Fan

Fan gives Scrooge a memory of being loved. Remembering her makes his rejection of her son harder to justify.

Fezziwig

Fezziwig shows that an employer’s influence is measured in other people’s daily lives. Scrooge recognises a kind of wealth that cannot be reduced to the party’s cost.

Belle

Belle makes the cost of Scrooge’s priorities personal. She recognises that his growing devotion to money has altered the relationship she agreed to.

Ignorance and Want

These allegorical children turn social problems into vulnerable human figures. Dickens makes neglect frightening while directing blame towards the society that produces it.

Inspector Goole

Goole replaces the host’s social authority with moral scrutiny. His uncertain identity does not remove the force of what the family learns.

Arthur Birling

Birling’s confidence protects profit and reputation. His response after Goole leaves tests whether discovering facts has produced ethical learning.

Sybil Birling

Mrs Birling turns social authority into a judgement about who deserves help. The order of revelations exposes the limits of her certainty.

Sheila Birling

Sheila’s development is visible in what she does after the Inspector leaves. Her insight survives the attempt to explain the evening away.

Eric Birling

Eric’s late acceptance of responsibility separates him from his parents, but admitting wrongdoing does not erase sexual coercion or the harm done to Eva.

Gerald Croft

Gerald’s apparent kindness operates within unequal power. Discovering uncertainty about Goole offers him a way to restore appearances without fully addressing the lesson.

Eva Smith / Daisy Renton

Eva never speaks on stage. The audience must examine how powerful people describe her while recognising the material harm their own accounts disclose.

Mickey Johnstone

Mickey’s changing body and voice make unequal opportunity visible over time. His adult distress grows within unemployment, imprisonment and damaged relationships.

Edward Lyons

Edward’s generosity can coexist with limited understanding. His different upbringing gives him resources Mickey cannot access and shapes what each considers a solvable problem.

Mrs Johnstone

Mrs Johnstone’s decision emerges from poverty and unequal bargaining power. The musical gives emotional force to both her constrained choices and her enduring attachment.

Mrs Lyons

Mrs Lyons tries to secure love through possession and secrecy. Material privilege cannot produce the emotional security she seeks.

Linda

Linda’s life reveals the effects of class and the twins’ unequal opportunities beyond the brothers themselves. She has needs and choices that exceed a rivalry between men.

The Narrator

The Narrator makes disaster feel inevitable while the drama reveals social conditions that can be questioned. Tension between fate and class is central to the musical.

Sammy Johnstone

Sammy connects early intimidation to adult criminal violence. His influence gives the idea of a role model a darker form than Edward’s friendship.

Mr Lyons

Mr Lyons helps represent the resources and assumptions surrounding Edward’s upbringing. His limited presence makes the division between financial authority and daily care visible.

Ozymandias

Power leaves claims behind; surviving art makes those claims vulnerable to judgement.

London

Oppression is a system shaping bodies, voices and even the ways people imagine freedom.

Extract from The Prelude

Nature overturns the young speaker’s self-assurance and remains powerful inside his imagination.

My Last Duchess

The Duke’s attempt to control a woman’s image exposes his own possessiveness.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Public honour celebrates the soldiers while the poem also records the failure that endangered them.

Exposure

War destroys through exhaustion and waiting as well as battle; nature defeats the promise of military purpose.

Storm on the Island

Preparation offers limited protection when an invisible force makes human confidence collapse.

Bayonet Charge

Physical terror strips the soldier of the abstract ideals that might once have justified battle.

Remains

A shooting that seems finished remains mentally present because responsibility and uncertainty have not ended.

Poppies

Separation can turn ordinary acts of care into an intense private encounter with public conflict.

War Photographer

Making suffering visible does not guarantee that distant viewers will accept responsibility.

Tissue

Human structures might become more humane if they accepted permeability, fragility and change.

The Émigree

Remembered belonging can resist political exclusion while remaining selective and idealised.

Checking Out Me History

Identity develops through questioning the histories that institutions choose to make visible.

Kamikaze

A decision to survive can lead to social exclusion so severe that ordinary ideas of life and death become unstable.

When We Two Parted

Secrecy and betrayal leave a relationship emotionally unfinished long after its end.

Love’s Philosophy

A speaker turns the apparent harmony of nature into a persuasive argument for intimacy.

Porphyria’s Lover

The lover’s claim to preserve a perfect relationship reveals possession, violence and distorted moral reasoning.

Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’

Imagination nourishes love but must give way when it conceals the real person it desires.

Neutral Tones

A failed relationship makes one memory into a lasting lens through which the speaker interprets love.

Letters From Yorkshire

An ordinary exchange of letters makes different lives mutually accessible without erasing their distance.

The Farmer’s Bride

The farmer’s account exposes how sympathy can coexist with a failure to respect another person’s freedom.

Walking Away

A parent’s love must make room for the child’s independence, even when separation feels painful.

Eden Rock

Precise family memories make an uncertain crossing feel both intimate and mysterious.

Follower

Admiration for a parent’s mastery develops into an uneasy recognition that dependence can reverse.

Mother, any distance

Moving towards independence stretches a family bond without making its value disappear.

Before You Were Mine

A daughter’s imaginative love recovers the mother’s independent youth while questioning a child’s possessive claims.

Winter Swans

A damaged relationship can begin to repair through shared observation and a small physical movement.

Singh Song!

Private tenderness and cultural self-expression challenge the idea that commercial duty should define a life.

Climbing My Grandfather

Intimate observation turns a grandfather’s ageing body into a landscape of adventure and security.

Lines Written in Early Spring

Nature’s apparent harmony prompts a repeated question about the harm humans do to one another.

England in 1819

Institutions that claim to sustain England are presented as draining its life, yet collapse may create an opening for change.

Shall earth no more inspire thee

Nature’s imagined voice offers an isolated mind a forceful invitation back into relationship.

In a London Drawingroom

A narrow urban view expands into a criticism of a society that restricts attention, feeling and individuality.

On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955

A courteous exchange reveals the gap between declaring racial solidarity and understanding another person’s world.

Name Journeys

The journey of a name exposes a struggle to keep cultural history audible within an environment that mishears it.

pot

Addressing a displaced object becomes a way to question the authority of museums and recover the human relationships behind display.

A Wider View

Looking beyond the limits of working life allows a descendant to recognise both an ancestor’s aspiration and a continuing connection.

Homing

Recovering a suppressed regional voice becomes an act of love and cultural inheritance.

A Century Later

Violence cannot fully control the imagination or the collective demand for education.

The Jewellery Maker

Beautiful luxury depends on skilled human labour whose rewards remain unequally distributed.

With Birds You’re Never Lonely

A more attentive relationship with nature unsettles narrow assumptions about hearing, solitude and belonging.

A Portable Paradise

A remembered place can be carried as a private source of strength and deliberately revisited under pressure.

Like an Heiress

An inherited love of place becomes morally uncomfortable when the speaker confronts environmental damage and her own ability to retreat.

Thirteen

Racialised suspicion can make a child’s public promise of a future feel conditional and unsafe.

Comparisons

Ozymandias / London

Landscape comparison: voice, power, ownership, structure and endings.

Comparisons

Storm on the Island / Extract from The Prelude

Power of nature — landscape comparison.

Comparisons

Remains / War Photographer

Memory and conflict — landscape comparison.