50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Poetry by Kenneth Slessor

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#11: The old orchard, full of smoking air, / Full of sour marsh and broken boughs

• Poem: Wild Grapes
• Techniques: Consonance, negative connotations, natural imagery

#12: The moment’s world it was; and I was part, / Fleshless and ageless, changeless and made free.

• Poem: Out of Time
• Techniques: Polysyndeton, irony, mourning tone 

#13: for that pale and faceless host / Without a flag, whose agony implores / Birth to be flesh, or funeral, to be ghost.

• Poem: Out of Time
• Techniques: Symbolism, macabre tone, tricolon 

#14: dark hair swinging and silver pins, / A girl half-fierce, half-melting

• Poem: Wild Grapes
• Techniques: Epizeuxis, contrast

#15: Are there not Saints in holier skies / Who have been scourged to Paradise?

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Contrast, motif, double-entendre, biblical allusion

#16: The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions / As blue as drowned men’s lips

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Consonance, lamenting tone, sombre imagery, contrast (between ‘breath’ and ‘drowned’) 

#17: Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs / The convoys of dead sailors come

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Consonance, geographical allusion, irony, paradox

#18: Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Direct tone, subverted rhythm and rhyme pattern

#19: The sand joins them together, / Enlisted on the other front.

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Sibilance, military diction, enjambment

#20: For God’s sake, call the hangman.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Declarative sentence, euphemism

Beauty VS Pain

#21: foxed with air; / Or piercing, like the quince-bright, bitter slats

• Poem: Out of Time
• Techniques: Consonance, imagery, geographical allusion, double-entendre 

#22: only grapes, / But wild ones, Isabella grapes they’re called, / Small, pointed, black, like boughs of musket-shot.

• Poem: Wild Grapes
• Techniques: Tricolon, juxtaposition, violent imagery, motif (of the bough as a gun) 

#23: half-savage with black fur. / Acid and gipsy-sweet, I thought of her, / Isabella, the dead girl

• Poem: Wild Grapes
• Techniques: Symbolism, contrast, connotations, parataxis 

#24: Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire / Someone, it seems, has time for this

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Onomatopoeia, ambivalence, violent imagery  

#25: You find this ugly, I find it lovely  

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Repeated refrain, literary allusion (Australian Bush poetry), contrast 

#26: Love, hunger, drunkenness, neuralgia, debt / Cold weather, hot weather, sleep and age 

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Lexical chain, negative connotations, juxtaposition 

Nature

#27: Here’s where the cherries grew that birds forgot / and apples bright as dogstars

• Poems: Wild grapes
• Techniques: Enjambment, simile, symbolism 

#28: Isabella grapes / outlaws of a strange bough, / That in their harsh sweetness

• Poem: Wild Grapes
• Techniques: Motif, oxymoron, paradox

#29: The red globe of light, the liquor green…spilt on the stones, go deeper than a stream;

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Urban imagery, contrast  

#30: Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish / and puffs of paraffin 

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Lexical chain, onomatopoeia, sensory imagery, alliteration

#31: Ranging the pavements of their pasturage 

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Pastoral imagery, literary allusion 

Individual VS Collective

#32: I’ll kick your walls to bits, I’ll die scratching a tunnel

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Aggressive tone, violent imagery 

#33: If you’ll give me a wall, if you’ll give me a simple stone, / If you’ll do me the honour of a dungeon

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Anaphora, paradox, oxymoron

#34: My cure of souls, my cage of brutes, / Go lick and learn at these my boots!

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Declarative tone, contrast, irony 

#35: O, souls that leak with holes of sin / Shall I not let God’s leather in

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Double entendre, consonance, lyrical rhyme

#36: Lashed with a hundred ropes of nerve and bone / I lie, poor helpless Gulliver

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, literary allusion

#37: Tied up with stuff too cheap, and strings too many.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Sibilance, defeated tone, juxtaposition

#38: If you’d give me a chain, if you’d give me honest iron, / If you’d graciously give me a turnkey

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Pleading tone, tricolon, anaphora, auxesis 

#39: I snap them, swollen with sobbing. What’s the use? / One hair I break, ten thousand hairs entwine me.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Alliteration, rhetorical question

#40: On backs bowed down and bodies bent.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Alliteration, violent imagery

#41: A litany of whips

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Contrast, violent tone

#42: I bid my cobbler welt the sole. / O, ye that wear the boots of Hell, / Shall I not welt a soul as well?

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Double entendre, homonym, metaphor, motif 

#43: My stripes of jewelled blood repeat / A scarlet Grace for holy meat.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Biblical reference, irony, sinister tone, religious diction

#44: But I, Lord, am Your humble wretch.

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Double entendre, juxtaposition

#45: Ghosts’ trousers, like the dangle of hung men…but none inside to suffer or condemn

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Haunting imagery, forgiving tone 

#46: The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze (death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)

• Poem: William Street
• Techniques: Slang, parentheses, consonance, lyrical tone  

#47: And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood, / Bears the last signature of men

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Double-entendre, metaphor

#48: Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity / The words choke as they begin –

• Poem: Beach Burial
• Techniques: Personification, onomatopoeia, paradox

#49: I’d have a chance yet, slip through the cage. / But who ever heard of a cage of hairs?

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Metaphor, paradox, rhetorical question 

#50: I could break my teeth on a chain, I could bite through metal, / But what can you do with hairs?

• Poem: Gulliver
• Techniques: Uncertain tone, contrast, rhetorical question