Wham Line / Poetry

• "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 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:
  "With my crossbow I shot the Albatross."
• "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning 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:
  "...That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
  Perfectly pure and good: I found
  A thing to do,and all her hair
  In one long yellow string I wound
  Three times her little throat around,
  And strangled her..."
• "And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head."
  • By the same poet (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:
    "Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
    Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
    Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
    And kept on drinking."
• In "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the statement of the great king and the revelation after make up the Wham Phrase.
• The ending of "Dirty Blood" from Marc Brightside's collection Keep It in the Family:
  "I am not like him, I am not his clone, I do not have AIDS."
• Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" goes from eerily metaphorical to shockingly literal in its final line:
  "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
• The ending of "Ballad of Birmingham" (about the 1963 KKK bombing that killed four black girls attending church) by Dudley Randall:
  "She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
  And lifted out a shoe.
  'O, here's the shoe my baby wore,
  But, baby, where are you?'"
• 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.
• 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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