Britsh Lit Final

Front 1

They hail me as one living,
      But don't they know
That I have died of late years,
      Untombed although?

I am but a shape that stands here,
      A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
      Ashes gone cold.

Not at a minute's warning,
      Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time's enchantments
      In hall and bower.

There was no tragic transit,
      No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
      On to this death ....

— A Troubadour-youth I rambled
      With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
      In me like fire.

But when I practised eyeing
      The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
      A little then.

When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
      Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
      I died yet more;

And when my Love's heart kindled
      In hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
      One more degree.

And if when I died fully
      I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
      I am to-day,

Yet is it that, though whiling
      The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
      I live not now.

Back 1

Dead Man Walking

Hint 1

Thomas Hardy
Modern

Front 2

Where modern methods be
What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying,
Its greens for ever graying,
Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it,
And riper seasons shown it,
But custom cries: "Disown it:

"Say ye rejoice, though grieving,
Believe, while unbelieving,
Behold, without perceiving!"

- Yet, would men look at true things,
And unilluded view things,
And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming,
Facts better their foredeeming,
And Life its disesteeming.

Back 2

sincerity

Hint 2

Thomas Hardy
Modern

Front 3

As it lay on the coals in the silence of night's profound,
And over the arm's incline,
And along the marge of the silkwork superfine,
And gnawed at the delicate bosom's defenceless round.
Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes;
The spectacle was one that I could not bear,
To my deep and sad surprise;
But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtive-wise
Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair.
"Thank God, she is out of it now!" I said at last,
In a great relief of heart when the thing was done
That had set my soul aghast,
And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past
But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.
She was a woman long hid amid packs of years,
She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight,
And the deed that had nigh drawn tears
Was done in a casual clearance of life's arrears;
But I felt as if I had put her to death that night!

Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive,
And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;
Yet--yet--if on earth alive
Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive?
If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?

Back 3

The Photograph

Hint 3

Thomas Hardy
Modern

Front 4

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Back 4

The Second Coming

Hint 4

W.B. Yeats
Modern

Front 5

What passing-bells2 for these who die as cattle? 
Only the monstrous anger of the guns. 
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle 
Can patter out3 their hasty orisons.4
No mockeries5 now for them; no prayers nor bells; 
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented6 choirs of wailing shells; 
And bugles7 calling for them from sad shires.8
What candles9 may be held to speed them all? 
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes 
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. 
The pallor10 of girls' brows shall be their pall; 
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, 
And each slow dusk11 a drawing-down of blinds.12

Back 5

Anthem For a doomed Youth

Hint 5

Wilfred Owen
Modern

Front 6

GROPING along the tunnel, step by step,  
He winked his prying torch with patching glare  
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.  
  
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,  
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;          5
And he, exploring fifty feet below  
The rosy gloom of battle overhead.  
  
Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie  
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,  
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.   10
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply.  
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.)  
"Get up and guide me through this stinking place."  
Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,  
And flashed his beam across the livid face   15
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore  
Agony dying hard ten days before;  
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.  
Alone he staggered on until he found  
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair   20
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground  
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.  
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,  
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,  
Unloading hell behind him step by step.   25
 

Back 6

The Rear Guard

Hint 6

Siegfred Sassoon
Modern

Front 7

YOU love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,  
Or wounded in a mentionable place.  
You worship decorations; you believe  
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.  
You make us shells. You listen with delight,          5
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.  
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,  
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.  
You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’  
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,   10
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.  
  O German mother dreaming by the fire,  
  While you are knitting socks to send your son  
  His face is trodden deeper in the mud

Back 7

Glory of Women

Hint 7

Siegfred Sassoon
Modern

Front 8

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) 
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12) 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13) 
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,

Back 8

Dulce et Decorum Est

Hint 8

Siegfred Sassoon
Modern

Front 9

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Back 9

Do not go gentle

Hint 9

Dylan Thomas
Post Modern

Front 10

Yes I am torching
ber curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

Back 10

Anorexic

Hint 10

Evan Boland
Post Modern

Front 11

This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.

I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.

I want to take
this dried-out face,
as you take a starling from behind iron,
and return it to its elements of air, of ending-

so that Autumn
which was once
the hard look of stars,

Back 11

A woman painted on a leaf

Hint 11

Evan Boland
Post Modern

Front 12

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates

Back 12

Poem in October

Hint 12

Dylan Thomas
Post Modern

Front 13

The leaves flick past the windows of the train
like feeding swifts; they're scooping up small mouth-
fuls of the midge-like autumn, fleeing south
with the train's hot wake; their feathers are small rain.
'Serin' they could say, where I'm passing through then just a sound could link rain with leaves'
symptom, of being sere. But who decieves
themselves such rhyming leaps knit seasons now?
Some Alchemist would get the point once;
why I, against the leaves example try--
migrating to my coold roots like a dunce.
Thicker than needles sticking to a fir,
winter is stitching mists of words with chance,
like smears of myrrh, like our small rain, our smirr.

Back 13

Smirr

Hint 13

W.N. Herbert
Post Modern

Front 14

An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.

Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see da turnabout?
jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout'.

For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.

Back 14

Colonization in Reverse

Hint 14

Louise Bennett
Post Colonial

Front 15

see book

Back 15

Chekov and Zulu

Hint 15

Salman Rushdie
Post Colonial

Front 16

See book

Back 16

Araby

Hint 16

James Joyce