1 | * "Literature/TheRimeOfTheAncientMariner" 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 | --> "[[KickTheDog 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.) |
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