Poetry Power and Conflict

• "a sneer of cold command"

  Ozymandias
• "king of kings"

  Ozymandias
• "round the decay of that colossal wreck"

  Ozymandias
• "Chartered Thames"

  London
• "In every cry"

  London
• "runs in blood down palace walls"

  London
• "upreared its head"

  Prelude
• "trouble to my dreams"

  Prelude
• "with purpose of its own/and measured motion like a living thing"

  Prelude
• "my gift of a nine-hundred -years-old -name"

  MLD
• "I gave commands/then all smiles stopped"

  MLD
• "taming a sea-horse"

  MLD
• "Into the valley of death/rode the six hundred"

  Charge of the Light Brigade
• "Cannon to right of them/cannon to the left of them"

  Charge of the Light Brigade
• "When can their glory fade?"

  Charge of the Light Brigade
• "The merciless iced east winds that knife us"

  Exposure
• "sudden successive flights of bullets"

  Exposure
• "the poignant misery of dawn begins to grow"

  Exposure
• "spit like a tame cat turned savage"

  Storm on the Island
• "strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear"

  Storm on the Island
• "you might think the sea is company/exploding comfortably down on the cliffs"

  Storm on the Island
• "patriotic tear"

  Bayonet Charge
• "King, honour, human dignity, etc./dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm"

  Bayonet Charge
• "his sweat heavy/stumbling across a field"

  Bayonet Charge
• "and tossed his guts back into his body"

  Remains
• "his bloody life in my bloody hands"

  Remains
• "I see every round as it rips through his life"

  Remains
• "all the words/flattened,rolled, turned into felt/slowly melting"

  Poppies
• "the world overflowing like a treasure chest" - the world is full of treasure and the speaker wants to get his hands on it.

  Poppies
• "I went into your bedroom/released a songbird from its rage"

  Poppies
• "running children in a nightmare heat" - the children are running away from the nightmare of war

  War Photographer
• "a hundred agonies in black and white" - the black and white imagery shows the horror of the war

  War Photographer
• "the reader's eyeballs prick/with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers"

  War Photographer
• "paper that lets the light shine through, this/is what could alter things"

  Tissue
• "place layer over layer" - the more you add, the more you can see, but the more you add, the more you lose detail
• "Let the daylight break through capitals and monoliths"

  Represents human governments and buildings, they are just temporary when compared to nature.

  Tissue
• "my memory of it is sunlight-clear"

  Emigree
• "that child's vocabulary I carried here/like a hollow doll"

  Emigree
• "I comb its hair and love its shining eyes"

  Emigree
• "dem tell me"

  Checking Out Me History