Memory in Power and Conflict

A dead looter behind closed eyes. A city made of sunlight. A boy on a stolen boat. The past does not stay in the past.

The quotes

13 quotes, in the order they happen.

a huge peak, black and huge

Wordsworth · Extract from The Prelude · power of nature · memory

A boy steals a boat. A mountain rises up behind him. He repeats huge because he has no other word for it.

huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men

Wordsworth · Extract from The Prelude · power of nature · memory

For days after, he sees giant shapes in his mind. Nature has changed how he thinks.

Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!

Tennyson · The Charge of the Light Brigade · conflict · memory

Tennyson asks us to honour them. He praises the courage and skips the blunder.

Slowly our ghosts drag home

Owen · Exposure · conflict · memory · loss

The men imagine going home. Only their ghosts can go.

Probably armed, possibly not

Armitage · Remains · conflict · memory

The soldier shot a looter. He does not know if the man had a gun. The doubt is what stays.

his bloody life in my bloody hands

Armitage · Remains · conflict · memory

Bloody as blood and bloody as a swear word. The last line. It echoes Macbeth.

He's here in my head when I close my eyes

Armitage · Remains · memory · conflict

He came home. The dead man came with him.

spasms of paper red

Weir · Poppies · conflict · loss · memory

Paper poppies on a blazer. Spasms sounds like pain. A mother pins one on her son.

A hundred agonies in black and white

Duffy · War Photographer · conflict · memory

A hundred photos of pain. The editor will pick five or six.

spools of suffering set out in ordered rows

Duffy · War Photographer · conflict · memory

The film rolls in his darkroom. Suffering, filed neatly.

I am branded by an impression of sunlight

Rumens · The Emigrée · memory · identity

She left her city as a child. Her memory of it is all sunlight. It is stamped on her.

There once was a country

Rumens · The Emigrée · memory · identity · loss

The first words. Like a fairy tale. The country she remembers may not exist any more.

a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous

Garland · Kamikaze · power of nature · memory

Looking down at the sea, he remembers his father's fishing boat. The sea wins.