English Literature Power and Conflict - key quotes

• Kamikaze - Beatrice Garland


  - Her father embarked at sunrise

  - Green-blue translucent sea

  - The turbulent inrush of breakers bringing their father's boat safe

  - He must have wondered which had been the better way to die.
• Checking Out Me History - John Agard


  - Dem tell me

  - Bandage up me eye with me own history blind e to me own identity

  - See-far woman of mountain dream

  - I carving out me identity
• The Emigree - Carol Rumens


  - Sunlight-clear

  - Sick with tyrants

  - They accuse me of absence, they circle me, they accuse me of being dark in their free city.
• Tissue - Imtiaz Dharker


  - Paper smoothed and stroked and turned transparent with attention.

  - What was paid by credit card might fly our lives like paper kites.

  - Turned into your skin.
• War Photographer - Carol Ann Duffy


  - Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

  - He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to now.

  - Blood stained into foreign dust.

  - A hundred agonies in black-and-white

  - Tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
• Poppies - Jane Weir


  - I wanted to graze my nose across the tip of your nose, play at being eskimos

  - Like a treasure chest

  - After you'd gone I went to your bedroom, released a song bird from its cage.

  - I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial, leaned against it like a wishbone.
• Remains - Simon Armitage


  - Probably armed, possibly not.

  - 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.
• Bayonet Charge - Ted Hughes


  - 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?

  - Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame and crawled in a threshing circle,

  - King, honour, human dignity, etcetera
• Storm on the Island - Seamus Heaney


  - We are prepared:

  - Exploding comfortably

  - The flung spray hits the very windows, spits like a tame cat turned savage.

  - It is a huge nothing that we fear.
• Exposure - Wilfred Owen


  - Merciless iced east winds that knive us...

  - Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,

  - Is it that we are dying?

  - The burying party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, pause over half known faces. All their eyes are ice, but nothing happens.
• The Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Lord Tennyson


  - Rode the six hundred.

  - Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them

  - Into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell

  - All the world wonder'd
• My Last Duchess - Robert Browning


  - That's my last duchess painted on the wall,

  - That spot of joy

  - I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.

  - My object

  - Taming a sea horse,
• The Prelude - William Wordsworth


  - A huge peak, black and huge,

  - Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

  - No pleasant images of trees, of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; but huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men,
• London - William Blake


  - I wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered Thames does flow,

  - Mind forged manacles

  - Chimney-sweeper's cry every black'ning church appals,

  - And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
• Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley


  - Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the dessert.

  - King of kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

  - Colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.