Literature Poems Key Quotes Flashcards
Papa T
- Aural imagery: “Their drums’ panicky rattle, their bugler’s yelp, musket-clap and popping cannons”
- Metaphor: “the perfect-lined face of a blank page,”
- Sibilance: “Shipwrecked”, “sit”, “sweet seasalter” and “sound”
- ‘I saw companies of redcoats tin-soldiering’
Envy
“If this tree were discontent ~ it all in vein would fret”
“Should it fret, you would suppose ne’re had seen its own red rose”
“Like such a blind and senseless tree”
“All envious persons are:
With care and culture all may find
Some pretty flower in their own mind”
Boat Stealing
“Small circles glittering idly in the moon
Until melting all into one track of sparkling light”
“After I had seen that spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being”
“Huge and mighty forms that do not live
Like living men moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were the trouble of my dreams”
The Destruction of Sennacherib
“The Assyrian came down like wolf on the fold”
“And sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea”
“Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:”
“Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn have blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strone”
“For the angel of death ~ breathed in the face of the foe as he passed”
“And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
As cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf”
“melted like snow in the glance of the Lord”
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses like the Heft,
Of Cathedral Tunes”
“Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar”
“When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows hold their breath”
Songs for the People
- ‘like a battle cry’
- ‘not for the clashing of sabres, for the carnage nor for strife’
- ‘to float o’er life’s highway’
We Lived Happily During the War
- ‘but not enough, we opposed them but not enough.’
- ‘I took a chair outside and watched the sun.’
- Repetition of ‘money’
- we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.’
Vergismeinnicht
“Mocked by his own equipment that’s hard and good when he is decayed”
“The dust upon his paper eyes”
“the burst stomach like a cave”
What were they like?
“Did the people of Vietnam use lanterns of stone?” ~ “Their light hearts turned to stone”
“Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds” ~ “After their children were killed there were no more buds”
“Did they use bone and ivory?” ~ “All the bones were charred”
Lament
“For the cormorant in his funeral silk”
“For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
The scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance and the ashes of language.”
Colonization in Reverse
- ‘feel like me heart gwine burs-‘
- ‘Jamaica people colonizin Englan in reverse.’
- ‘de motherlan’
- What an islan! What a people!
Flag
~learn whole poem by heart~
Thirteen
- ‘cornered’
- ‘Thirteen, you’ll tell him: you’re thirteen.’
- ‘patted on the shoulder’
- ‘you were all supernovas’
- ‘the biggest and brightest stars.’
- ‘While fear condenses on you lips’
Honour Killing
“This black veil of a faith
that made me faithless to myself”
“These lacy things
that feed dictator dreams”
“I’m taking of this skin
and then the face, the flesh,
the womb”
“making, crafting,
plotting
at my new geography”
Partition
“she could hear the cries of the people”
“Now, when my mother
tells me this in her kitchen - she is
seventy-years old and India
is ‘fifty’…”
