Poetry Anthology Key Quotes

Ozymandias

'I met a traveller from an antique land'

'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone'

'Half sunk, a shattered visage lies'

'Sneer of cold command'

'Tell that its sculptor'

'The hand that mocked them'

'My name is ozymandias, King of Kings'

'Ye Mighty and Dispare'

'Colossal wreck'

London

'I wander each chartered street'

'In every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe'

'the mind forged Manacles I hear'

'How the chimney sweepers cry/

'Hapless soldier's sigh'

'Runs in blood down the palace walls'

Through midnight streets I hear how the youthful Harlot's cry'

'And blights with plagues and marriage hearse'

Extract from, The Prelude

'I found a little boat tied to a willow tree'

'It was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure'

'Small circles glittering idly in the moon'

'A huge peak, black and huge'

'Grim shape'

'In grave and serious mood'

'Dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being'

'No pleasant images of trees, of sea or sky'

'Trouble to my dreams'

My Last Duchess

'My last duchess painted on the wall'

'Looking as if she were alive'

'Fra Pandolf's hands'

The depth and passion of its earnest glance'

'She had a heart- how shall i say?- too soon made glad'

'Some officious fool broke into the orchard for her'

'My gift of a nine hundred years old name'

'I gave commands; and all smiles stopped together'

'We'll go down together'

The Charge of the Light Brigade

'Half a league, half a league, half a league onwards'

'Into the valley of death'

'Rode the six hundred'

'Some one had bluner'd'

'Canon to the right of them, Canon to the left of them, canon in front of them'

'Boldly they rode and well'

'Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell'

'Plunged in the battery smoke'

'Shatter'd and sunder'd they rode back'

'Not the six hundred'

'Came thro' the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell'

'Left of six hundred'

'When can their glory fade'

Exposure

'Iced east winds that knive us'

'The night is silent'

'But nothing happens'

'Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles'

'Poignant misery of dawn begins to grow'

'Melancholy army'

'Bullets streak the silence'

'wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance'

'Back on forgotten dreams'

'Is it that we are dying'

'Slowly our ghosts drag home'

'We turn back to our dying'

'For love of god seems dying'

Storm on the Island

'We built our houses squat'

'Raise a tragic chorus in a gale'

'You can listen to the thing you fear'

'Exploding comfortably'

'We just sit tight while wind dives'

'We are bombarded by the empty air'

'A huge nothing that we fear'

Bayonet Charge

'Suddenly he awoke'

'His sweat heavy'

'Bullets smacking the belly out of the air'

'Sweating like molten iron'

'Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs'

'King, honour, human dignity, etcetera'

'His terror's touchy dynamite'

Remains

'On another occasion we got sent out'

'Probably armed, possibly not'

'All of the same mind'

'I see every round as it rips through his life'

'On the ground, sort of inside out'

'Image of agony'

'Tosses his guts back into his body'

'End of story, except not really'

'Dream and he's torn apart by a dozen rounds'

'And the drink and the drugs won't flush him out'

'His bloody life in my bloody hands'

Poppies

'Spasms of red paper disrupting a blockade

'Sellotaped bandage around my hand'

'Steeled the softening of my face'

'I resisted the impulse'

'All my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt'

'The world overflowing like a treasure chest'

'Released a songbird from its cage'

'My stomach busy making tucks, darts, pleats, hat-less'

'Hoping to hear your playground voice catching on the wind'

War Photographer

'In his darkroom he is finally alone'

'Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows'

'The only light is red and softly glows'

'Solutions slop in trays'

'Home again to ordinary pain'

'A half- formed ghost'

'How the blood stained into foreign dust'

'A hundred agonies in black and white'

'Between the bath and pre-lunch beers'

'He earns his living and they do not care'

Tissue

'Light shines through'

'Paper thinned by age or touching'

'The kind you find in well-used books'

'Smoothed and stroked and turned'

'If buildings were paper'

'They fall away on a sigh

'Sun shines through their borderlines'

'Might fly our lives like paper kites'

'And never wish to build with brick again'

'Never meant to last'

'Of paper smoothed and stroked'

'Turned into your skin'

The Emigrée

'I left as a child but my memory is sunlight- clear'

'I am branded with an impression of sunlight'

'Time rolls its tanks'

'It tastes of sunlight'

'I have no passport, there's no way back at all'

'My city takes me dancing through the city

'My city hides behind me'

'They mutter death'

'My shadow falls as evidence of sunlight'

Checking out Me History

'Dem tell me Dem tell me'

'Blind to me own identity'

'No dem never tell me bout dat'

'Toussaint a slave...'

'Dem tell me bout Florence Nightingale and she lamp'

'But dem never tell me bout Mary Seacole'

'I checking out me own history'

'I carving out me own identity'

Kamikaze

'Her father embarked at sunlight'

'Enough fuel for a one way journey into history'

'Little fishing boats strung out like bunting'

'He must have looked far down'

'Like a huge flag waved first one way then the other'

'Safe to the shore'

'And though he came home'

'Though he no longer existed'

'He must have wondered which had been the better way to die'

Context