Poem recognition Flashcards
Take ’old o’ the Wings o’ the Mornin’,
An’ flop round the earth till you’re dead;
But you won’t get away from the tune that they play
To the bloomin’ old rag over’ead.
The Widow At Windsor, R. Kipling
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
Adlestrop, E. Thomas
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
The Soldier, R. Brooke
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
The General, S. Sassoon
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one
Attack, S. Sassoon
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
Glory of Women, S. Sassoon
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Break of Day in the Trenches, I. Rosenberg
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
Anthem for Doomed Youth, W. Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Dulce et Decorum Est, W. Owen
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Futility, W. Owen
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Strange Meeting, W. Owen
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Easter 1916, W. B. Yeats
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
Adam’s Curse, W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats
What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern?
No Second Troy, W. B. Yeats
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
Byzantium, W. B. Yeats
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Sailing to Byzantium, W. B. Yeats
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
The Circus Animals’ Desertion, W. B. Yeats
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Leda and the Swan, W. B. Yeats
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
The Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room;
Gerontion, T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,—dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.
Still Falls the Rain, E. Sitwell
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Musee des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In Memory of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Sunday Morning, L. MacNeice
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
Poem in October, D. Thomas
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hang man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, D. Thomas
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Punishment, S. Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Digging, S. Heaney
And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:
The group’s name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.
Black Jackets, T. Gunn
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
My Sad Captains, T. Gunn
Move forward run my hand around the font.
From where i stand the roof looks almost new–
Cleaned or restored? someone would know: I don’t.
Church Going, P. Larkin
I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.
Book Ends, T. Harrison
When I come round, they’ll be laid out, the sweets,
Lifesavers, my father’s New World treats,
still in the big brown bag, and only bought
rushing through JFK as a last thought.
Long Distance, T. Harrison
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In a Station of the Metro, E. Pound
What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.
Above the Dock, T. E. Hulme
The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.
The Dawn Whiteness, J. Campbell
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Pike, T. Hughes
