Power and conflict

• KAMIKAZE (3)


  -a shaven head full of powerful incantations

  -the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun

  -he must have wondered which had been the better way to die
• CHECKING OUT ME HISTORY (2)

  -dem tell me, dem tell me

  -bandage up me eye with me own history / Blind me to me own identity
• OZYMANDIAS (2)


  -a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of old command

  -round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away
• LONDON (3)


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

  -in every infant's cry of fear [..] mind-forged manacles I hear.

  -blights with plagues the marriage hearse
• THE PRELUDE (3)


  -'proud of his skill [...] with an unswerving line' compare to 'with trembling oars I turned'

  -'she was an elfin pinnace' + 'like a swan' compare to 'the horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge [...] upreared its head'

  -a trouble to my dreams
• MY LAST DUCHESS (3)

  -that's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive

  -none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I

  -but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together.
• EXPOSURE (3)


  -our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...

  -all their eyes are ice

  -but nothing happens
• STORM ON THE ISLAND (3)

  -'we are prepared: we build our houses squat [...] goodslate.' compare to last line 'it is a huge nothing that we fear'

  -spits like a tame cat turned savage

  -exploding comfortably
• BAYONET CHARGE (4)


  -the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest

  -he almost stopped - In what cold clockwork oof the stars and the nations

  -his terror's touchy dynamite

  -a yellow hare that rolled like a flame And crawled in a threshing circle
• REMAINS (3)


  -I see every round as it rips through his life - I see broad daylight on the other side (contrasts with colloquial lang of first 2 stanzas)

  -Sleep, and he's probably armed, possibly not. Dream, and he's torn apart by a dozen rounds.

  -his bloody life in my bloody hands.
• POPPIES (3)


  -spasms of paper red [...] sellotape bandaged around my hand

  -all my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt, slowly melting. I was brave

  -the world overflowing like a treasure chest
• WAR PHOTOGRAPHER (4)


  -spools of suffering set out in ordered rows

  -a stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost.

  -reader's eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers

  -he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care
• TISSUE (3)


  -paper that lets the light shine through

  -Maps too. The sun shines through their borderlines

  -with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last, of paper smoothed and stroked (repetition of line 11)
• THE EMIGRÉE (3)


  -I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

  -it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants

  -they mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight
• CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (4)


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

  -rode the six hundred (ends first three stanzas)

  -all the world wonder'd (double meaning)

  -Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred! (last line)