Animals Quiz: The Answers

1. Very smooth he looked, yet grim; / seven blood-hounds followed him

P B SHELLEY / MASK OF ANARCHY

2. His pair of black / Horses, like man and wife / Shifting their weight from foot to / Foot, and gazing into the future

PAUL MULDOON / WHY BROWNLEE LEFT

3. ‘The years shall run like rabbits / For in my arms I hold / The Flower of the Ages / And the first love of the world.’

W H AUDEN / AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING

4. When I kiss you in all the folding places / of your body, you make that noise like a dog / dreaming, dreaming of the long run he makes / in answer to some jolt to his hormones

JO SHAPCOTT / MUSE

5. Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, / Who pens a few sheep in the gap of cloud.

R S THOMAS / A PEASANT

6. When I came in that night I found / the skin of a dog stretched flat and / nailed upon my wall between the / two windows

FLEUR ADCOCK / A SURPRISE IN THE PENINSULA

7. It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow / Swarm over, Death!

JOHN BETJEMAN / SLOUGH

8. Arctic fox, a hare, a tern, polar bear; / region of the egg-race of the goose, / the snowy owl mistaken for a lynx, / the endless patience of the moose.

SIMON ARMITAGE / URSA MINOR

9. The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

LORD BYRON / THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SENNACHERIB

10. And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; / Hedge-crickets sing; and new with treble soft / The red-breast whistles from garden-croft;

JOHN KEATS / TO AUTUMN

11. No time to stand between the boughs / And stare as long as sheep or cows

W H DAVIES / LEISURE

12. I am not yet born; O hear me. / Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the / club-footed ghoul come near me

LOUIS MACNEICE / PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH

13. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown. / Your mouth open clean as a cat’s

SYLVIA PLATH / MORNING SONG

14. Barely a twelvemonth after / The seven days war that put the world to sleep, / Late in the evening the strange horses came.

EDWIN MUIR / THE HORSES

15. My father worked with a horse-plough, / His shoulders globed like a full sail strung / Between the shafts and the furrow. / The horses strained at his clicking tongue

SEAMUS HEANEY / THE FOLLOWER

16. I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines / And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks

EILEAN NI CHUILLEANAIN / SWINEHERD

17. You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, / And the swish of a skirt in the dew

RUDYARD KIPLING / THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS

18. Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar

T S ELIOT / HOLLOW MEN

19. When he came back / He said the horses were restless, and I was sad / That any man or beast that night should lack / The happiness I had

PHILIP LARKIN / WEDDING-WIND

20. Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each / Feels shorter than the day / I first surmised the horses' heads / Were toward eternity.

EMILY DICKINSON / BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH