Macbeth + Poetry

Macbeth

“For brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name – disdaining fortune with his brandish’d steel, which smoked with bloody execution, like valour’s minion carving out a passage”
“Will all great Neptune’s Ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
“Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow”

Lady Macbeth

“Come you evil spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”
“When you durst do it then you were a man”
“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t”
“Out, damned spot, out I say!”

Witches

“All hail, Macbeth, who shall be King hereafter!”
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”
“Fair is foul and foul is fair; hover through the fog and filthy air”

“The instruments of darkness tell us truths”

Ambition

“Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires”
“I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other.”
“Come you evil spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”

Supernatural

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”
“Come you evil spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”
“Fair is foul and foul is fair

Guilt

“Will all great Neptune’s Ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
“Thou’st can’t say I did it; never shake thy gory locks at me”
“Out, damned spot, out I say!”

Relationships

“My dearest partner of greatness”
“Valiant cousin, worthy gentleman”

Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”
“boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretched far away”

London (William Blake)

“In every infant’s cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind forged manacles I hear”
“Mark in every face I see, marks of weakness, marks of woe”

War Photographer (Carol Ann Duffy)

“All flesh is grass // He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to do so now.”
“Something is happening. A stranger’s features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost.

Exposure (Wilfred Owen)

“Our brains ache, the merciless iced winds that knive us”
“Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.”

Checking Out Me History (John Agard)

“Bandage up me eye to me own history. Blind me to me own identity.”
“Dem tell me. Dem tell me. Dem tell me what dem want to tell me. But now I checking out me history. I carving out me identity”

Charge of the Light Brigade (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

“Theirs not to make reply. Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.”
“When can their glory fade? […] Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred!”

Prelude (William Wordsworth)

“With trembling oars I turned, and through the silent water stole my way back to the covert of the willow tree;”
“a huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct, upreared its head”