Power and Conflict Quotes Analysis

'Half sunk, a shattered visage lies'

Symbolic of his power

'Half sunk' --> verb phrase

'Shattered' --> adjective

'wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command'

Presenting as powerful and arrogant

Thought little of anyone else

'wrinkled lip' --> noun phrase

'cold command' --> noun phrase

'stamped on these lifeless things'

Statue itself --> 'lifeless' / dead

Could refer to those (citizens) beneath him

'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains'

'ye' --> Distant past; archaic

'Mighty' --> Ambiguous, Gods? Other rulers?

'Nothing beside remains' --> Emphasises nothing else remains

'colossal wreck'

Ironic --> only thing colossal now is his wrecked statue - no longer his power

'mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness'

'mark' --> to notice; visual - repeated

'every' --> adjective

'weakness' --> poverty

'Every black'ning church appalls'

Shameful --> church do nothing to help

'black'ning' --> staining, negative connotations

'Runs in blood down palace walls'

Tarnishes palace

Monarchy does nothing --> responsible

'palace' --> French Revolution

'the youthful harlot's curse / Blasts the new-born infant's tear'

'harlot' --> prostitue - poor women had few options

'curse' --> literal meaning = wish upon someone; swearing? Pain of life? Pain                     of birth?

                 Non-literal meaning = STIs

'Blasts' --> plosive; hearing loss (sephilis)

Everything the prostitute does infects the child

'troubled pleasure'

Noun phrase

Oxymoron --> knows it's wrong but it's pleasurable

'a huge peak, black and huge'

More awe-inspiring

'black; --> cannot see

'huge' --> repeated

'the grim shape / Towered up'

'grim' --> something to be feared

'Towered' --> verb

'unknown modes of being'

Is there a higher being?

'huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men'

Cannot describe it

'Like living men' --> simile

'since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I'

Control

Dramatic Monologue --> revealing character

'She had / A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad'

'glad' --> open-hearted; ordinarily a good thing

'how shall I say?' --> Speaking thoughts aloud - minicks speaking

'My gift of a nine-hundred-year-old name'

She didn't rank the Duke the highest

'I gave commands'

'commands' --> ambiguous - about her behaviour? To have her killed?

            shows his power

'Forward, Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns! he said'

'he said' --> ambiguous - messenger? officer?

'Into the jaws of Death / Into the mouth of Hell'

'Death' + 'Hell' --> personified

'When can their glory fade?'

Rhetorical question --> their glory should not fade

'Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us'

Weather is the enemy --> trench foot, muddy conditions, frostbite

'Our' --> collectivity

'ache' --> emotive

'merciless' --> adjective

'east' --> winds colder from that direction

'winds that knive us' --> personification

'knive' --> verb

'like a dull rumour of some other war / What are we doing here?

"You will hear of wars, and rumours of wars" --> Biblical

'like a dull rumour' --> Simile

'rumour' --> Are we here? Hullicinate

'What are we doing here?' --> Rhetorical question - doesn't know the answer

'we' --> inclusive

'We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy'

Power of 3 --> persuasion

'only' --> Adverb

'sag' --> hang low - full of rain

'But nothing happens'

Emphasises bordem

Repeated

'Pale flakes with ********* stealth come feeling for our faces'

'Pale flakes' --> personified

'stealth' --> secretively

     'Macbeth' --> acted with stealth during murders

'Slowly our ghosts drag home ... With crusted dark-red jewels'

'drag home' --> imagining the journey home

'dark-red' --> adjective

'All their eyes are ice'

Would have known them (dead)

'their' --> ambiguous - dead? burying-party?

'We are prepared'

'We' --> collective pronoun

'we build our houses squat'

'squat' --> with 'rock' --> assonace - brings together (connects) man and nature

   sturdiness

'This wizened earth has never troubled us / With hay'

'wizened' --> barren island

'Which might prove company when it blows full / Blast'

'company' --> lonely island

Enjambment --> emphasises the next line

'Blast' --> plosive - power of the weather

'spits like a tame cat / Turned savage'

'like a tame cat' --> simile

Enjambment --> something comforting turning fearful; beginning to end

'savage' --> dangerous

'Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear'

'nothing' --> unable to see the storm

'fear' --> contrasts the beginning

'Suddenly he awoke and was running'

Media res --> plunged into battle; creates confusion

'Suddenly' --> adverb

'The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / Sweating like molten iron'

Patriotism replaced by pain

'like molten iron' --> simile

'In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations / Was he the hand pointing that second?'

Soldier is apart of a big machine --> he has no control

'cold clockwork' --> alliteration

'cold' --> no longer working; no emotion

'nations' --> patriotism; flags

Rhetorical question

'King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm'

Linked to propaganda

'etcetera' --> not worth listing everything; the previous becomes meaningless

'like luxuries' --> simile

'alarm' --> just about survival

'On another occasion'

In media res

Anecdote --> "chatty" story

'probably armed, possibly not'

'probably' and 'possibly' --> adverbs; conditionals

   Got to decide quickly

'Three of a kind all letting fly ... I see every round as it rips through his life'

'letting fly' --> "trigger happy"

'I see' --> visual

'End of story, except not really'

Volta --> story doesn't end after the body's gone

'he bursts again through the doors of the bank'

'b' sound --> plosive

'again' --> PTSD - memory plays itself on repeat

'And the drink and the drugs won't flush him out'

'drink and ... drugs' --> negative coping mechanisms

'flush' --> semantic field; flush out/expose the enemy

'dug in behind enemy lines, not left for dead in some distant ... land'

'dug in behind' --> stuck in his head

'enemy lines' --> semantic field

'distant ... land' --> very real; cannot get rid of him despite being back in Britain

'but near to the knuckle, here and now, / his bloody life in my bloody hands'

'near to the knuckle' --> too painful; combat

'here and now' --> immedience of it

'bloody' --> adjective

     1) swearing; turned his life to blood

     2) he's responsible; guilt (Lady Macbeth)

'my' --> no longer collective responsibility

'spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade / of yellow bias binding'

'blockade' --> war - foreshadows his death

  disrupts domestic scene

'All my words / flattened, rolled, turned into felt, / slowly melting'

Speechless --> links to fabrics

'slowly melting' --> metaphor

'After you'd gone I ... released a song bird from its cage'

'After you'd gone' --> ambiguous - died? left home?

'released a song bird' --> metaphorical; letting her son go

'song bird' --> beautiful bird

'my stomach busy / making tucks, darts, pleats'

Sewing imagery

"Butterflies" --> physical grief

'I traced / the inscriptions on the war memorial / leaned against it like a wishbone'

'traced' --> touch/feel (tangeable); wants her son there, not a memory

'war memorial' --> other soldiers; think of other parents

'like a wishbone' --> simile; wish/hope

'hoping to hear / your playground voice catching on the wind'

Desperate to hear

'playground' --> back to childhood memories

      small/vulnerable; still vulnerable in the end

'catching' --> do anything; catch, grasp

'spools of suffering set out in ordered rows'

'spools of suffering' --> metaphor; sibilance

'spools' --> reels of film

Ironic --> war/suffering is chaotic

'Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass'

'Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh' --> All places of civil war

      Plosive --> mimicks sound of bullets

'All flesh is grass' --> Biblical; temporariness of life

'fields which don't explode beneath the feet / of running children in a nightmare heat'

'fields' --> contrasts England to war zones

'nightmare heat' --> reference to "Napalm Girl" photo

'blood stained into foreign dust'

'stained' --> verb/metaphor; stain of war

'dust' --> "dust to dust, ashes to ashes"

Links to Remains

'A hundred agonies in black-and-white'

'hundred agonies' --> noun phrase

Blunt --> clear-cut

'The reader's eyeballs ***** / with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers'

'*****' --> few tears --> emotive

'pre-lunch beers' --> relaxing

'tears' and 'beers' --> short distance between rhyme --> people only care                                                                                                   momentarily

'in well-used books / the back of the Koran'

'well-used' --> important and fragile

'Koran' --> religious book - special

'Fine slips ... might fly our lives like paper kites'

'Fine slips' --> receipts; record of our economical day

'like paper kites' --> simile

'paper kites' --> escape from burden of bills

     receipts not kept for long

'with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last'

'living tissue' --> more important than what's left

'never meant to last' --> life is temporary but lasting impression is left

'There once was a country'

'once was' --> fairytale - magical? fantasy?

'my memory of it is sunlight-clear'

'memory' --> past experience; distant

'sunlight' --> bright, happy, sunlight

'Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it'

'coloured' --> brightness

'molecule' --> exaggeration; every last bit of it

'my city comes to me in its own white plane'

'comes to me' --> ambiguous - in thoughts? towards her? in dreams?                                            refugees?

'white' --> cleanliness; bright; purity

'They accuse me of being dark in their free city'

'They' --> racists? people from the country she's in now?

'dark' --> different; skin colour; doesn't fit in

'their free city' --> ironic - wouldn't be their's if it's free

'Dem tell me / Dem tell me'

Satirical (all non-italics)

Strong rhythm

Repeated

Colloquial --> asserting his language

'Dem tell me bout de dish ran away with de spoon / but dem never tell me bout Nanny de marron'

bathos --> serious to not serious

Taught every aspect of British culture --> nursery rhymes

     poke fun at the culture

'Nanny de maroon' --> Ghana; slave taken to Jamaica

'But now I checking out me own history / I carving out me identity'

'I checking out me own' --> asserting himself

'I carving' --> Cannot put an identity on him; he will create his identity

'a healing star / among the wounded / a yellow sunrise / to the dying'

'healing star' --> metaphor; links to line 29

'yellow sunrise' --> hope; new beginning

'Her father embarked at sunrise'

In media res --> middle of a tale

'sunrise' --> Japan - Land of the Rising Sun

'a one-way / journey into history'

'history' --> context --> Suicide Pilots; honourable; bring glory to their country

'he must have looked far down / at the little fishing boats / strung out like bunting'

'he must have' --> thinking of reasons he wouldn't go through with the mission

'like bunting' --> simile; used at celebration

'they treated him / as though he no longer existed'

He brought shame to the family; didn't complete his mission

'only we children still chattered and laughed'

'only we children' --> they still treated him as being alive; unaware of the                                             shame he brought back

'And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered / which had been the better way to die'

'better way to die' --> he had a living death; would it have been to die as the                                        pilot?

'dark shoals of fishes / flashing silver'

Nature is oblivious

'flashing' --> verb

'silver' --> reference to planes, fishes, samurai sword

'...the shore, salt-sodden, awash...'

's' sound --> sibilance; onomatopoeia - mimicks sound of the sea