Poetry - Quotes Flashcards
Ozymandias
“Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare”
“Vast and trunkless legs of stone”
“Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!”
London
“And the hapless soldier’s sigh run in blood down palace walls”
“Near where the chartered Thames does flow”
“every black’ning church appals”
“and blights with plagues the marriage hearse”
The Prelude: Stealing the Boat
“the horizon’s utmost boundary; far above was nothing but the star and the grey sky”
“The horizon’s bound a huge peak, black and huge”
“Elfin pinnace”
My Last Duchess
“half flush that dies along her throat”
“how shall i say- too soon made glad, too easily impressed”
“i gave commands, then all smiles stopped together”
“since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you”
The Charge Of The Light Brigade
“theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why. theirs but to do and die”
“cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them”
“into the valley of death rode the six hundred”
Exposure
“but nothing happens”
“our brains ache in the merciless iced east winds that knive us”
“sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence” >
> “less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow
Storm on the Island
“spits like a tame cat turned savage”
“strange it is a huge nothing that we fear”
“we are bombarded by the empty air”
Bayonet Charge
“suddenly he awoke and was running”
“bullets smacking the belly out of the air”
“the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest”
Remains
“i swear i see every round as it rips through his life”
“his blood shadow stays on the street and out on patrol”
“probably armed, possibly not”
“his bloody life in my bloody hands”
Poppies
“i listened, hoping to hear your playground voice”
“the world overflowing like a treasure chest”
“steeled the softening of my face”
“released a song bird from its cage”
War Photographer
“spools of suffering set out in ordered rows”
“from which his editor will pick out five or six for sunday’s supplement”
“a stranger’s features faintly starting to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost”
“a hundred agonies in black and white”
Tissue
“with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last”
“paper that lets the light shine through”
“written in the names and histories, who was born to whom”
“turned into your skin”
The Emigreé
“bright filled paper weight”
“it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants, but i am branded by an impression of sunlight”
“and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight”
Kamikaze
“her father embarked at sunrise”
“a shaven head full of powerful incantations”
“nor did she meet his eyes”
“he must have wondered which had been the better way to die”
“strung out like bunting on a green-blue translucent sea”
Checking out me History
“bandage up me eye with me own history, blind me to me own identity”
“a healing star among the wounded, a yellow sunrise”
“but now i checking out me own history, i carving out me identity”
“dem tell me bout columbus and 1492 but what happen to de caribs and de arawaks too”
