Poem recognition

Question 1

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.

Answer 1

The Widow At Windsor, R. Kipling

Question 2

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.

Answer 2

Adlestrop, E. Thomas

Question 3

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.

Answer 3

The Soldier, R. Brooke

Question 4

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.

Answer 4

The General, S. Sassoon

Question 5

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

Answer 5

Attack, S. Sassoon

Question 6

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.

Answer 6

Glory of Women, S. Sassoon

Question 7

What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?

Answer 7

Break of Day in the Trenches, I. Rosenberg

Question 8

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.

Answer 8

Anthem for Doomed Youth, W. Owen

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

Dulce et Decorum Est, W. Owen

Question 10

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?

Answer 10

Futility, W. Owen

Question 11

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.

Answer 11

Strange Meeting, W. Owen

Question 12

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.

Answer 12

Easter 1916, W. B. Yeats

Question 13

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.

Answer 13

Adam’s Curse, W. B. Yeats

Question 14

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,

Answer 14

The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats

Question 15

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?

Answer 15

No Second Troy, W. B. Yeats

Question 16

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

Answer 16

Byzantium, W. B. Yeats

Question 17

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.

Answer 17

Sailing to Byzantium, W. B. Yeats

Question 18

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.

Answer 18

The Circus Animals’ Desertion, W. B. Yeats

Question 19

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Answer 19

Leda and the Swan, W. B. Yeats

Question 20

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost

Answer 20

The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

Question 21

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,

Answer 21

The Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot

Question 22

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;

Answer 22

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

Question 23

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;

Answer 23

Gerontion, T. S. Eliot

Question 24

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Answer 24

The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

Question 25

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,—dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.

Answer 25

Still Falls the Rain, E. Sitwell

Question 26

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.

Answer 26

Musee des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden

Question 27

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

Answer 27

In Memory of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden

Question 28

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;

Answer 28

Sunday Morning, L. MacNeice

Question 29

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

Answer 29

Poem in October, D. Thomas

Question 30

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.

Answer 30

The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, D. Thomas

Question 31

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Answer 31

Punishment, S. Heaney

Question 32

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Answer 32

Digging, S. Heaney

Question 33

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.

Answer 33

Black Jackets, T. Gunn

Question 34

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!

Answer 34

My Sad Captains, T. Gunn

Question 35

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.

Answer 35

Church Going, P. Larkin

Question 36

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.

Answer 36

Book Ends, T. Harrison

Question 37

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.

Answer 37

Long Distance, T. Harrison

Question 38

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Answer 38

In a Station of the Metro, E. Pound

Question 39

What seemed so far away

Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

Answer 39

Above the Dock, T. E. Hulme

Question 40

The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.

Answer 40

The Dawn Whiteness, J. Campbell

Question 41

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,

Answer 41

Pike, T. Hughes