Poems Flashcards
Quotes from futility by Wilfred Owen
“Move him into the sun”
“Gently it’s touch awoke him once, at home, whispering of fields unsown”
“Until this morning and this snow”
“If anything might rouse him now the kind old sun will know”
“Think how it wakes the seeds”
“Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides full nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall?”
“-O what made Fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?”
Quotes from church going by Philip Larkin
“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on”
“Brewed god knows how long”
“Someone would know : I don’t”
“I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence”
“Yet stop I did, in fact I often do”
“But superstition, like belief, must die, and what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky”
“In separation, marriage, and birth and death, and thoughts of these”
“A hunger in himself to be more serious”
“Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in”
Mad girls love song by Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”
“I think I made you up inside my head”
“The stars go waltzing out in blue and red and arbitrary darkness gallops in”
“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed and sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane”
“God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade”
“But I grow old and I forget your name”
“ I should have loved a thunderbird instead; at least when spring comes they roar back again”
Vers de societe by Philip
Larkin
“My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps to come and waste their time and ours: perhaps you’d care to join us?”
“The gas fire breathes”
“I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted, holding a glass of washing sherry, canted over to catch the drivel of some bitch”
“Just think of all the spare time that has flown straight into nothingness, by being filled with forks and faces”
“Rather than repaid, under a lamp”
“All solitude is selfish”
“Talking to god (who’s gone too); the big wish, is to have people nice to you, and that means doing it back somehow”
“Playing at goodness, like going to church?”
“Only the young can be alone freely”
“And sitting by a lamp more often brings not peace, but other things”
“Beyond the light stand failure and remorse whispering dear warlock Williams: why of course —“
Quotes from aubade by Philip Larkin
I work all day and get half drunk at night
Waking at four to soundless dark
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify
This is a special way of being afraid
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with
Death is no different whined at than withstood
It stands plain as a wardrobe
Postmen like doctors go house to house
Quotes from one art by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master
So many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel
I lost my mothers watch. And look! My last, or next to last, of three loved houses went
I lost two cites, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster
— even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied”
It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master, though it may look like (write it!) like disaster.
