Power and conflict key quotations Flashcards
1
Q
London
A
- I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
- The mind forged manacles I hear
- Every blackening Church appalls
- Runs in blood down the Palace walls
- And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
2
Q
My Last Duchess
A
- That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call
- twas not / Her husband’s presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek
- as if she ranked / My gift of a nine hundred years old name / With anybody’s gift.
- but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.
- Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity, / Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
3
Q
The Charge of the Light Brigade
A
- Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death.
- Theirs but to do and die
- while / All the world wondered
- All the world wondered
- Honour…Honour
4
Q
Poppies
A
- spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer
- blackthorns of your hair. All my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt, slowly melting
- threw it open, the world overflowing like a treasure chest.
- After you’d gone I went into your bedroom, released a song bird from its cage.
- The dove pulled freely against the sky, an ornamental stitch, I listened, hoping to hear your playground voice catching the wind.
5
Q
Checking out me history
A
- Dem tell me/Dem tell me/What dem want to tell me.
- Bandage up my eye with me own history.
- Toussaint/A slave/With vision/Lick back/Napoleon
- Dem tell me bout Columbus and 1492/But what happen to de Caribs and the Arawaks too.
- A healing star
- But now I checking out me own history/I carving out me identity.
6
Q
Kamikaze
A
- Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword.
- like a huge flag waved first one way then the other in a figure eight,
- the loose silver whitebait and once a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous.
- only we children still chattered and laughed till gradually we too learned to be silent,”
- And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die.
7
Q
The Emigree
A
- There once was a country…I left as a child but my memory of it is sunlight clear.
- It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants, but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
- That child’s vocabulary I carried here like a hollow doll, opens and spills grammar.
- It lies down in front of me, docile as paper; I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
- My city hides behind me. They mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
8
Q
Exposure
A
- Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent.
- Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army/Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey.
- So we drowse, sun dozed/Litttered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses. – Is it that we are dying?
- Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born/For love of God seems dying.
- Pause over half known faces. All their eyes are ice/But nothing happens.
9
Q
The Prelude
A
- One summer evening (led by her) I found/A little boat tied to a willow tree.
- The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above/Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
- And growing still in stature the grim shape/Towered up between me and the stars, and still…
- my brain/Worked with a dim and undetermined sense/Of unknown modes of being
- But huge and mighty forms, that do not live/Like living men, moved slowly through the mind/By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
10
Q
Ozymandias
A
- I met a traveller from an antique land
- And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
- The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed
- Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
- Of that colossal Wreck
11
Q
Tissue
A
- Paper that lets the light shine through, this is what could alter things,
- the back of the Koran, where a hand has written in the names and histories,
- Maps too. The sun shines through their borderlines.
- find a way to trace a grand design with living tissues,
- and thinned to be transparent, turned into your skin.
12
Q
War photographer
A
- In his dark room he is finally alone/with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows
- a priest preparing to intone a Mass./Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.
- a half formed ghost. He remembers the cries/of this man’s wife, how he sought approval.
- The reader’s eyeballs prick with tears. between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
- From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care.
13
Q
Remains
A
- On another occasion, we got sent out
- I see every round as it rips through his life–
- One of my mates goes by/and tosses his guts back into his body
- And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out–
- but near to the knuckle, here and now, his bloody life in my bloody hands.
14
Q
Storm on the island
A
- Storm on the island
- Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate./This wizened earth has never troubled us.
- So that you listen to the thing you fear/Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
- You might think that the sea is company,/Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs.
- Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
15
Q
Bayonet charge
A
- Suddenly he awoke and was running- raw/In raw-seamed, hot khaki, his sweat heavy,
- Bullets smacking the belly out of the air –/He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm;
- In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations/Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running.
- Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame/And crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wide.
- King, honour, human dignity, etcetera/Dropped like luxuries.
- His terror’s touchy dynamite.
