Poetry Flashcards
Ozymandias - ‘king of kings’
- a monarch of society
- baseless scream of egotistical influence
- destructive nature - blatant authority
- implies himself as a ‘worship worthy’ emblem - no care in maintaining the statue - ‘colossal wreck’
- In Greek tragedy, excessive hubris or defiance of the god leads to nemesis - he uses a petrachan sonnet
- As we progress through the poem, we witness the metaphorical decay of power as art and literature surpass megalomaniac
- Iambic pentameter - resembles a heartbeat - could be the nature of man being diffused by the control of time
- Almost mocking him as he seeks to strive for an afterlife past immortality
Ozymandias x London (1)
‘king of kings’ x ‘chartered Thames does flow’
- lack of liberation to the people as they juxtapose a seemingly free flowing body of water with the institutionalised adjective ‘chartered’. it indicates a similar sense of hopelessness, as the Thames - a known, central monument is plagued with cyclical corruption in the now explicit, darkened underbelly of an impoverished 18th century metropolis
London - ‘mind forged manacles’
- argues that the struggle is eternal, however Ozymandias seems to contradict and state that if the tyranny of the anarchy is competing with nature, it will lose
- Echoes Rosseau’s concept that man is born free but everywhere is in chains
- ‘mind forged’ - abstract adjective, discusses younger generations trapped with the purpose of dejection, however they can be broken out of
- Crystallising his hatred to the ignorance whipped to the plight of the poor, when confronted with the Industrial revolution
- the response to the pollution is chains
- brainwashing alliteration
Ozymandias x London (2)
mind forged manacles x nothing beside remains (…) of that colossal wreck
- almost acclimatises the reader - relief that it is gone
- ends with bare nature
- futility of treating people inhumanely
- arrogant diffuses
- panorama of the beginning transitions into the narrow concept of eradicated dictatorship
- ‘colossal’ makes it seem as if a burden has been lifted from society as mother nature engulfs the prideful
- highlights the vain, monarchy who has screamed that their ‘name is,,,’ eradicated ambigiously as it is evaporated by the no named forces of time
- two contrary states of the human soul - songs of innocence and songs of experience
Remains ‘myself and somebody else and somebody else are all of the same mind’
- lack of connection despite their life on the line
- anonymity of somebody else highlights the futility of war as on the battlefield, everyone is seen as a target
- witness the doubt creeping into his voice
- his human nature bursts through the poem
- different to Ozymandias’s immortal desire, his is to survive
- repetition of teamwork
- has no time - Ozymandias has all the time, London suspended in time, war photographer is after time
- the torture of defencelessness
- the perspective of someone without power
- complexity of relationships entangled with..
- external senses are delayed
- identical suffering
Remains ‘tosses his guts back into his body’
- seems horrified he is; it has burned itself into his mind, the image of this man writhing in agony, almost dead but not quite
It’s another form of dehumanization, a way of making light of the situation, almost; the man who they’ve shot and killed is, for his mate, nothing more than a casualty of war, nothing more than a piece of garbage to be lumped together and thrown away.
- brutality
- constant conflict between the realism of the events and the horror of the remains
- graphic
- death discriminate between people, uses contemporary vocabulary to relate, but to be blunt
- lack of adjectives
- mechanism
- confrontational anecdotal phrase
War photographer ‘all flesh is grass’
- quote from the old testament, book of Isaiah - mankind has interpreted peace and evolution incorrectly, to the point where they are destroying the earth so much they have to attempt to replace it in order to survive - link to Ozymandias
- bloodshed mocks his vision, staining and coating his vision grimly
- documents conflict with himself, tortures himself with grief
- power comes at a price - different to the others
- Britain’s foundations are still burdened
- responsibility morphs and disfigures his memory
- his emotions repel against his job
- abnormal numbers of death brings the realisation - directly unparallel with remains
- ALL flesh
- humanitarian
War photographer ‘A hundred agonies in black and white’
- leads to the moral question if war can be black and white
- convolution of the living and the dead
- intone of the past
- juxtaposition
- choking the figures in ink
- spools of tribulation
- use flesh is grass analysis too
- failed to attempt to conceal the pain
The Prelude - ‘(led by her)’
- Nature is controlling him, but not fearful like mankind
- Bracketed - concealing?
- Seductive
- Arrogance isn’t prominent
The Prelude - ‘usual home (…) unloosed her chain’
- Secretive, majestic
- Echoes troubled pleasure
- DIRECTLY juxtaposes - eery foreshadow
- Restriction - encroaching detriment
The Prelude - ‘an elfin pinnace ; lustily’
- Seven deadly sins - LUST not LOVE
- Ethereal - beyond human comprehension
- Valting tone yet no imposing threat
- Folklore contribution - fae - deceiving
The Prelude - ‘a huge peak, black and huge (…) with voluntary power instinct’
- Conversational
- Echoed atmosphere
- Vocabulary is less fluff, more stammery
- Instristic
-Massive presence - dominating - Morbid?
My last duchess- ‘Will’t you please sit and look at her?’
- Detached tone
- Immediate viewpoint away from the duchess
- We rely solely on this description - manipulative
My last duchess - ‘(The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)’
- Parenthesis - arrogance - mimicking the curtains as the information is closeted and revealed to us
- Breaks down power and build it up by his definitions
- territorial, obsessive, possessive
My last duchess - ‘Half flush that dies along with her throat: such stuff’
- Envy - seven deadly sins correlation
- Throat - CANT SPEAK
- The thought of her is ‘stuff’ - dehumanised - insignificant
- Rhyming couplets
- Animated enjambment - exposing true colours through another person
- Calculated euphamisms yet she still controls him
- Ironic - meant to be ambigious-
