English Lit - Poetry Flashcards
Ozymandias - description of Ozymandias’ face
“Half sunk, a shattered visage lies”
Ozymandias - alliterative description of Ozymandias’ facial expression
“Sneer of cold command”
Ozymandias - Ozymandias’ declaration
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Ozymandias - description of the desolation around the statue
“boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
What form is Ozymandias written in?
A mixture between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet
London - comment on increase in rich landowners owning everything, even trying to own the river itself
“I wander through each chartered street,/Through where the chartered Thames does flow”
London - commenting on how people’s hardship is largely caused by human actions
“The mind-forged manacles I hear”
London - drawing attention to power imbalance and how authorities pointlessly send soldiers to die in war
“And the hapless soldier’s sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls”
London - suggesting that prostitutes have destroyed and corrupted marriage
“How the youthful harlot’s curse/Blasts the new-born infant’s tear/And blights with plagues the marriage hearse”
What form is London written in?
Regular ABAB rhyme scheme, with 4 four line stanzas, in iambic tetrameter
My Last Duchess - narrator automatically assuming he is more intelligent than his guest and trying to impress them
“I said/’Fra Pandolf’ by design”
My Last Duchess - expressing narrator’s jealousy regarding his wife
“Sir, ‘twas not / Her husband’s presence only, called that spot/Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek.”
My Last Duchess - describing how he became sterner (possibly also killed his wife)
“This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together”
My Last Duchess - changing subject to other prized possessions
“Notice Neptune, though/Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,/Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!”
What form is My Last Duchess written in?
All one long stanza, reflecting how the Duke holds all the power and must not be interrupted; Dramatic monologue
Remains - the refrain reflecting the narrator’s guilt at potentially killing an innocent person
“Probably armed, possibly not”
Remains - struggling to recall the names of his colleagues
“Well my self and somebody else and somebody else”
Remains - describing how he sees the robber in his nightmares
“But near to the knuckle, here and now/His bloody life in my bloody hands”
Remains - sibilant description of the body
“Left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land/Or six feet under in desert sand”
What form is Remains written in?
A monologue, with a feeling of fast-paced natural speech
Poppies - using military imagery and plosive alliteration to make you feel the loss
“Disrupting a blockade/of yellow bias binding around your blazer”
Poppies - describing how painful loss is through metaphor
“I resisted the impulse/to run my fingers through the gelled/blackthorns of your hair”
Poppies - describing how appealing the world is to her son
“A split second/and you were away, intoxicated”
Poppies - being weak from loss and remembering
“I traced/the inscriptions on the war memorial,/leaned against it like a wishbone”
