Poetry Key Quotes

"I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert."

"Half sunk, a hattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command"

"Stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear"

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"

"Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare"

"And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe"

"The mind forged manacles I hear"

"How the chimney-sweepers cry

Every black'ning church appals

And the hapless soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down palace walls"

"How the youthful harlot's curse

Blasts the new-born infants tear

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse"

"It was an act of stealth

And troubled pleasure"

"Small circles glittering idly in the moon,

Until they melted all into one track"

"The horizons utmost boundary; far above

Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky"

"And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan

...

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary powers instinct"

"I struck and struck again,

And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me ands the stars"

"And throughthe meadows homeward went, in grave

And serious mood; but after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts"

"Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams"

"The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)"

"Sir, 'twas not

Her husbands presence only,called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess' cheek:"

"Half flush that dies along her throat: such stuff was courtsey, she thought"

"The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She road around the terrace"

"I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet

The comapany below."

"Nay we'll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse"

"Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death"

"Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die"

"Storm'd at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the Jaws of Death

Into the mouth of Hell,

Rode the six hundred"

"While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro' the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell"

"When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made

All the world wonder'd

Honour the charge thery made

Honour the Light Brigade

Noble six hundred"

"Our brains ache, In the merciless iced east winds that knive us"

"Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,

But nothing happens"

"Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles"

"Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence, less deadly than the air"

"Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed

With crusted dark-red jewels: crickets jingle there;"

"Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

Nor ever sun smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

For Gods invincible spring our love is made afraid"

"The burying party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,

Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,

But nothing happens"

"We are prepared, we build our houses squat,

Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate"

"Nor are there trees

Which might prove company when it blows full

Blast: You know what I mean - Leaves and branches

Can raise a tragic chors in a gale"

"So you can listen to the thing you fear

Forgetting that it pummels yor house too"

"But there are no tree's, no natral shelter. 

You might think that the sea is company,

Exploding comfortably down the cliffs."

"Spits like a tame cat

Turned savage" 

"We are bombarded by the empty air.

Strange, it is a huge nothing we fear"

"Suddenly he awoke and was running - raw"

"Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge

That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing

Bullets smacking the belly out of the air

He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm;

The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye"

"In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running

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

"King, honour, human dignity, etcetera

Dropped like luxaries in a yelling alarm

To get ot of that blue crackling air

His terror's touchy dynamite"

"I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals,

spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade

of yellow bias binding around your blazer"

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

"I was brave, as I walked

with yo, to the front door, thew

it open, the world overflowing

like a treasure chest"

"I went into your bedroom,

released a song bird from its cage"

"The dove pulled freely against the sky, an ornamental stitch"

"In his darkroom he is finally alone

With spools of suffering set out in ordered rows"

"All flesh is grass"

"To ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, to field which dont explode beneath the feet of running children in nightmare heat"

"A strangers features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half formed ghost"

"He sought approval without words to do what someone mst

and how the blood stained into foreign dust"

"A hundred agonies in black-and-white"

"There once was a country...I left it as a child

But my memory of it is sunlight clear"

"The worst news I recieve of it cannot break

my original view, the bright, filled paperweight. 

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

But I am branded by an impression of sunlight"

"The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes

glow even clearer as the time rolls its tanks"

"The childs vocabulary I carried here

like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar"

"It may now be a lie, banned by the state,

but I cant get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight"

"They accuse me of being dark in their free city. 

My city hides behind me. They mutter death,

and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight"

"I comb its hair and love its shining eyes. 

My city takes me dancing through the city of walls"

"Bandage up me eye with me own history

Blind me to me own identity"

"But now I checking out me own history

I carving out me own identity"

"Full of powerful incantations

and enough fel for a one-way

journey into history"

"At the little fishing boats

strng out like bunting

on a green-blue translucent sea"

"Like a huge flag waved first one way

then the other in a figre of eight,

the dark shoals of fishes

flashing silver as their bellies

swivelled towards the sun"

"With cloud-marked mackerel

black crabs, feathery prawns;

the loose silver of whitebait and once

a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous"

"And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered

which had been the better way to die"