Every card in Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)
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- What form of poem is Ozymandias? (one word)
sonnet
HintCount the lines: there are fourteen.
WhyIt does not keep to either of the standard sonnet rhyme schemes. One reading is that the broken pattern suits a poem about a broken statue.
- The words on the pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, king of ____”.
kings
HintHe claims to rule over all other rulers.
WhyThe boast survives; the kingdom does not. The statue's inscription is the only place where the king still speaks.
- The inscription continues: “Look on my works, ye ____, and ____!”
Mighty; despair
HintHe addresses other powerful people and tells them how they should feel.
WhyHe meant: despair of ever matching me. Now that nothing is left, the line means something else: despair, because this is what becomes of all power. The irony is the heart of the poem.
- Straight after the boast comes the shortest sentence in the poem: “Nothing beside ____.”
remains
HintA verb meaning is left; as a noun it can mean ruins or a dead body.
WhyThe flat three-word sentence answers the grand inscription. The poem then ends on “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- Ozymandias is a Greek name for a real ruler. Of which country was he a pharaoh?
Egypt
HintThe statue stands in a desert in North Africa.
WhyHe is Ramesses II. Shelley began the poem in 1817, when part of a huge statue of that pharaoh was expected in Britain, and published it in 1818.
- The speaker of Ozymandias has not seen the statue himself. Who describes it to him?
A traveller “from an antique land”
HintSomeone the speaker met.
WhyThe king's power reaches us third-hand: through the sculptor, then the traveller, then the speaker. Each step makes Ozymandias smaller and further away.
- From the second stanza of London: “The mind-forged ____ I hear”.
manacles
HintMetal cuffs that fasten a prisoner's wrists.
WhyThey are made in the mind: people are held down by ways of thinking as well as by laws. Blake's own spelling is mind-forg'd; some editions modernise it.
- In the first stanza both the street and the River Thames are called “chartered”. What does the repeated word suggest?
That everything in the city, even the river, is owned and controlled
HintA charter was a legal document granting rights or ownership.
WhyA river should be free. In this city nature itself has been mapped and licensed by those with power.
- What the speaker sees in every face he meets: “Marks of ____, marks of ____.”
weakness; woe
HintTwo w words: one for lack of strength, one for deep sorrow.
WhyThe word “mark” comes three times in two lines, and the repetition makes the suffering feel stamped on everyone. In the anthology's text the first of the three is a verb, meaning to notice.
- In the third stanza a chimney-sweeper's cry and a soldier's sigh are each set against a building. Which two institutions do the buildings stand for?
The Church and the monarchy
HintOne stands for religion, the other for the state.
WhyThe cry “Every blackening church appals” and the sigh “Runs in blood down palace-walls”. Blake holds those in power answerable for the suffering in the streets.
- The poem's last two words are “marriage hearse”. Why is the phrase so jarring?
It joins a wedding to a funeral: a beginning to a death
HintA hearse carries a coffin.
WhyPutting two opposed ideas side by side like this is an oxymoron. Blake suggests that the city's misery poisons even love and new life.
- London comes from Blake's collection Songs of Experience. In which year was it published? (year, four digits)
1794
HintFive years after the French Revolution began.
WhyThe Songs of Experience answer his earlier Songs of Innocence. London is one of its angriest poems, written when revolution abroad had made the British government nervous of dissent.
- At the start of the extract from The Prelude, what does the boy do one summer evening?
He takes a small boat that is not his and rows out on the lake
HintHe finds it tied to a willow tree.
WhyHe calls it “an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure”: he knows he is doing wrong, and enjoys it uneasily.
- The boy says he found the boat “(led by her)”. Who or what is “her”?
Nature
HintWordsworth treats it as a guide and teacher throughout the poem.
WhyNature is personified as a female presence who leads the boy to the experience and then teaches him a lesson through it.
- What rises up behind the ridge as the boy rows: “a huge peak, black and ____”.
huge
HintThe poet reaches for an adjective and can only find one he has just used.
WhyRepeating the plain word suggests that the boy has run out of language for what he sees. The peak seems to grow and to come after him “like a living thing”.
- At first the boat moves “like a swan”. How does the boy row back to the shore?
“With trembling oars”: frightened and shaken
HintHis confidence has gone.
WhyThe extract turns at the moment the peak appears. Before it the boy is proud of his skill; after it he steals back to the mooring place.
- How the experience stays with him afterwards: “There hung a darkness, call it ____ / Or blank desertion.”
solitude
HintThe state of being alone.
WhyFor many days his mind is filled with “huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men”. Nature has shown him a power far beyond his own.
- The Prelude has no rhyme and, in this extract, no breaks into stanzas. What is its verse form called?
Blank verse
HintUnrhymed lines of ten syllables.
WhyThe Prelude is a very long poem about the growth of the poet's own mind. The unbroken, flowing verse suits a memory told in one breath.
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