Line #5 WhamLine/Poetry

Context WhamLine / Poetry

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1	* "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Creator/SamuelTaylorColeridge starts as an old sailor telling a sea tale to a younger wedding guest. The ship survived a storm and a cute albatross followed the ship, played with the crew, and became the ship's mascot. Then the sailor makes his confession:
2	--> "With my crossbow I shot the Albatross."
3	* "Porphyria's Lover" by Creator/RobertBrowning starts off as a standard Victorian romantic poem about a man waiting in a cold, "cheerless" cottage for his lover Porphyria to arrive. She comes in out of the driving rain, kindles a fire, and pledges her love for the narrator. Then we get this:
4	--> "...That moment she was mine, mine, fair,\
5	Perfectly pure and good: I found\
6	A thing to do,and all her hair\
7	In one long yellow string I wound\
8	Three times her little throat around,\
9	And strangled her..."
10	* "And [[Literature/CollectedPoems1921 Richard Cory]], one calm summer night,/[[StepfordSmiler Went home and put a bullet through his head.]]"
11	** By the same {{poet\|ry}} (Edwin Arlington Robinson), we get the poem of "Miniver Cheevy", who hates the modern world and wishes he had lived in the time of knightly chivalry. The last verse goes:
12	---> "Miniver Cheevy, born too late,\
13	Scratched his head and kept on thinking;\
14	Miniver coughed, and called it fate,\
15	[[TheAlcoholic And kept on drinking.]]"
16	* In "Ozymandias" by Creator/PercyByssheShelley, the statement of the great king and the revelation after make up the Wham Phrase.
17	* The ending of "Dirty Blood" from Marc Brightside's collection ''Keep It in the Family'':
18	--> "I am not like him, I am not his clone, I do not have AIDS."
19	* Randall Jarrell's [[http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/jarrell.turret.html "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"]] goes from eerily metaphorical to shockingly literal in its final line:
20	--> "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
21	* The ending of "Ballad of Birmingham" (about the 1963 KKK bombing that killed four black girls attending church) by Dudley Randall:
22	--> "She clawed through bits of glass and brick,\
23	And lifted out a shoe.\
24	'O, here's the shoe my baby wore,\
25	But, baby, where are you?'"
26	* Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting": "I am the enemy you killed, my friend". And earlier in the poem "And by his dead smile, I knew we stood in hell." Absolutely chilling lines in one of the bleakest anti-war poems ever written.
27	* Seamus Heaney's "Mid-Term Break": "A four-foot box, one foot for every year." (Cue gut-wrenching sobs as the meaning of the poem hits you.)

Context WhamLine / Poetry