War Poem Quotes

Question 1

If I should die, think only this of me:

Answer 1

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

Question 2

That is for ever England. There shall be

Answer 2

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

Question 3

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Answer 3

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

Question 4

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Answer 4

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Question 5

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

Answer 5

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Question 6

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Answer 6

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

Question 7

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

Answer 7

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Question 8

For years afterwards the farmers found them –

Answer 8

the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades

Question 9

as they tended the land back into itself.

Answer 9

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,

Question 10

the relic of a finger, the blown

Answer 10

and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

Question 11

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white

Answer 11

across this field where they were told to walk, not run,

Question 12

towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

Answer 12

And even now the earth stands sentinel,

Question 13

reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

Answer 13

like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

Question 14

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,

Answer 14

a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,

Question 15

their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

Answer 15

in boots that outlasted them,

Question 16

their socketed heads tilted back at an angle

Answer 16

and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung

Question 17

have only now, with this unearthing,

Answer 17

slipped from their absent tongues.

Question 18

She sits in the tawny vapour

Answer 18

That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled,

Question 19

Behind whose webby fold-on-fold

Answer 19

Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glimmers cold.

Question 20

A messenger’s knock cracks smartly,

Answer 20

Flashed news in her hand

Question 21

Of meaning it dazes to understand
Though shaped so shortly:

Answer 21

He—he has fallen—in the far South Land…

Question 22

‘Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,

Answer 22

The postman nears and goes:

Question 23

A letter is brought whose lines disclose
By the firelight flicker

Answer 23

His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Question 24

Fresh—firm—penned in highest feather—
Page-full of his hoped return,

Answer 24

And of home-planned jaunts of brake and burn

Question 25

In the summer weather,

Answer 25

And of new love that they would learn.

Question 26

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Answer 26

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Question 27

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

Answer 27

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Question 28

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

Answer 28

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Question 29

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Answer 29

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Question 30

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Answer 30

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

Question 31

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

Answer 31

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Question 32

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

Answer 32

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

Question 33

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

Answer 33

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Question 34

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Answer 34

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

Question 35

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

Answer 35

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

Question 36

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Answer 36

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Question 37

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Answer 37

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

Question 38

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

Answer 38

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

Question 39

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Answer 39

Pro patria mori.