poems

• ozymandias (romantic percy shelley)

  • sonnet / caesura / enjambement
  • 'my name is ozymandias king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty and despair nothing besides me remains'
  • 'wrinkled lip; and sneer of cold command'
• london (romantic william blake)

  • abab rhyme scheme
  • 'each chartered street near where the chartered thames does flow'
  • 'blood down palace walls'
  • 'marriage hearse'
• the prelude (romantic william wordsworth)

  • enjambement / caesura / phallic
  • 'i unloosed her chain and stepping pushed'
  • 'she was an elfin pinnace: lustily i dipped my oars into the silent lake' {small, delicate boat}
  • 'no pleasant images of trees'
• my last duchess (robert browning)

  • iambic pentameter / rhyming couplets / dramatic monologue
  • 'i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. there she stands as if alive'
  • 'notice neptune, though, taming a sea horse'
• the charge of the light brigade (poet laurete tennyson)

  • rhythmic chorus
  • 'cannon to right of them cannon to the left of them cannon behind/in front them'
  • 'into the valley of death rose the six hundred'
• exposure (fan of the romantics wilfred owen)

  • regulated structure with enjambement / pararhyme / cyclical
  • 'like twitching agonies of men among its brambles'
  • 'this frost will fasten on this mud and us'
  • 'but nothing happens'
• storm on the island (seamus heaney)

  • caesura / enjambement
  • 'we are prepared'
  • 'you might think that the sea is company, exploding comfortably'
  • 'turned savage'
• bayonet charge (poet laureate ted hughes)

  • in media res / free verse / caesura
  • 'yellow hare that rolled like a flame'
  • 'and his foot hung like statuary in mid stride'
  • 'bullets smacking the belly out of the air'
• remains (simon armitage)

  • in media res / colloquial / enjambement
  • 'his bloody life in my bloody hands'
  • 'dead in some distant sun stunned sand smothered land or six feet under in dessert sand'
  • 'tosses his guts back into his body'
• poppies (jane weir)

  • semantic field for textiles / direct address / enjambement
  • 'before you left [...] crimped petals, spasms of paper red'
  • 'all my words, flattened, rolled, turned into felt'
  • 'released a song bird from its cage'
• war photographer (carol ann duffy)

  • rhyming couplets / caesura / enjambement
  • 'his editor will pick out five or six for sunday's supplement'
  • 'spools of suffering [...] the only light is red and softly glows'
  • 'features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half formed ghost'