Key Quotes

Ozymandias

• Ozymandias is so arrogant and cocky, he thinks he is above everyone, including God.
• "Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
• The sculptor could see the cruelty/meanness in Ozymandias' face and chiselled it into the statue. (SHOWS HIS ARROGANCE)
• "Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"
• Shelley uses imagery to get the point that nothing of Ozymandias' is left. And even if it is, it's in thousands of pieces.
• "Colossal wreck"​​​​​​​
• Shelley uses the letter "b" as a plosive to emphasise the vastness and sheer power of this otherwise desolate desert.
• "Boundless and bare""Boundless and bare"​​​​​​​

Extract from The Prelude

• Wordsworth uses a oxymoron in the quote to show that he feels some guilt for stealing the boat, but it feels good all the same.
• "Troubled Pleasure"
• Wordsworth uses a simile and a oxymoron in the quote to show how the boat moved gracefully and elegantly.
• "Went heaving through the water like a swan"
• The change in tone in The Prelude can be seen in the quote shows that nature isn't what it seemed - it is powerful and can be seen as a monster.
• "A huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct, upreared its head."
• Lines 29 to 44 show that the threat of nature has changed Wordsworth's views.
• "By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."

My last duchess

• The first person used in the quote shows that The Duke still controls his last Duchess even during death.
• "Since none puts by the curtain I have drawn but I"
• The quote shows that the Duke had expectations for the Duchess but she did not meet them. The dashes emphasise the Duke's relaxed/arrogant attitude to his views on her.
• "She had a heart - how shall I say this?- too soon to make glad"
• Arrogant - only wants her to be flattered by him.
• "Too easily impressed"
• The use of rhyming couplets, which are used throughout the poem, cast a shade of lightheartedness upon the happenings and because it is the Duke speaking of such happenings one could assume the Duke thinks little of the ordeal.
• "The bough of cherries some officious fool, broke in the orchard for her, the white mule"
• Arrogance - Duchess doesn't consider his family name as important as he does. "Anybody's" highlights his arrogance.
• "My gift of a nine-hundred-year-old name with anybody's gift."
• Considers his actions acceptable because surely others are similarly disgusted.
• "Who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling?"
• Duke giving orders to kill his wife, arrogance. The duke talks of it very simply, coldly and almost seems to relish in the memories of it all.
• "I gave commands; and the smiles stopped altogether."
• His memory of his wife is no more than a trinket.
• "Notice Neptune , though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!"

Exposure

• Wilfred Owen uses personification in the quote to show that nature is against those in the trenches.
• "Merciless iced winds that knife us"
• Wilfred Owen uses simile and emotive language to describe a gruesome image. Nature is a recurring theme.
• "Like twitching agonies of men among the brambles"
• Wilfred Owen uses a oxymoron to describe the suffering to be perennial.
• "misery of dawn"
• Wilfred Owen uses a semantic field to describe nature to be like an army.
• "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey"
• Alliteration - Presents snowflakes as killers, snowflakes thought to be pretty and fragile.
• "With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew"

Storm on the Island

• Heaney uses metaphor to describe the chaos of the storm.
• "Leaves and branches can raise a tragic chorus"
• Alliteration is used to describe the incessant droning of the storm and the violent verb 'flung' describes the storm to be powerful.
• "Flung spray hits the very windows spits like a tame cat turned savage."
• Nature offers no protection and is in control.
• "No natural shelter"
• Simile is used to show that nature can be safe at times but dangerous at others.
• "Like a tamed cat turned savage"
• Nature is personified through the comparison of it to humans's machinery. If nature has the guns and artillery of humans what chance do humans stand?
• "Strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo"

Bayonet Charge

• The use of simile suggests that the rifle has become a part of him, making him a weapon, unfeeling and 'numb'.
• "A rifle as numb as a smashed arm"
• The reader is thrown straight into the action, the solider is vulnerable.
• "Suddenly he awoke"
• Because the reader is thrown into the action and because a lot of emotive language is used, the poem has a tiring feel to it. The repeated 'h' signifies heavy breathing.
• "'Hot"..."his"...heavy...stumbling, lugged"
• "Violent imagery and onomatopoeia describes the sound and impact of the shots.
• "Bullets smacking the belly out of the air"
• "Clockwork, connotations of time running out, death, stars have connotations of fate.
• "In what cold clockwork of the stars and nations"
• Purely driven by terror, has become a weapon
• "His terrors touchy dynamite"

Remains

• Verb 'tosses' and colloquial language suggests carelessness as if to say in war life is worthless.
• "Tosses his guts back into his body"
• Repetition emphasises loss of identity, implies men are interchangeable.
• "Three of us open fire...three of a kind"
• Repetition emphasises the bloodiness of war and also hints at illness of the mind, hallucinations.
• "His bloody life in my bloody hands"
• Implies that his first thought is one of defence, assumes that he is an enemy. Also the quote is repeated at the start and at the end of the poem which shows that he is struggling to keep control of his emotions.
• "Probably armed possible not"
• Says that the blood will always be there.
• "His blood shadow"

Poppies

• Lots of this poem is in the past tense which could show that the present holds too much pain.
• "Playground voice"
• Violent noun 'spasms' connotes pain, 'red' is associated with blood and 'blockade', a word within the semantic field of war, is used.
• "Spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias"
• There is conflict between the domestic and military language which shows that fighting is always on the readers mind.
• "Reinforcement of scarf and gloves"
• Use of metaphor shows how vulnerable she is.
• "Leaned against it like a wishbone"
• Use of metaphor show how, because he has grown up, he rebuffs his mother's affections.
• "Blackthorns of your hair"

War Photographer

• Has connotations of a serious, brooding, place - perhaps suggesting that the job takes the photographer to a dark place mentally, a place filled with stress or horror.
• "Darkroom"
• The alliteration and assonance mirrors the repetition of the spools laid out on the photographers table: ordered, a meticulous arrangement - Repetitive.
• "Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows"
• The pain and suffering is all around her in the blood red light and the phrase "softly glows" creates an eerie effect.
• "the only light is red and softly glows"