Bottles in the Bombed City
Bottles in the Bombed City - meaning Summary
Memory Blurred by Attack
The poem depicts a city transformed by a sudden violent act described as a "stroke," which isolates memory and scrambles meaning. Physical decay—water seeping into old industrial buildings and tiles and bricks being unearthed—stands alongside surreal shifts in language and place, where names trade associations and countryside scents are dumped on urban streets. The final image of bottles "winking" at one another conveys a strange, unsettling liveliness amid damage and disrupted history.
Read Complete AnalysesThey gave the city a stroke. Its memories are cordoned off. They could collapse on you. Water leaks into bricks of the Workers' century and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget now squares with another. If the word is Manchester it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels. To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her. Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up, blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange, umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel. Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules. When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.
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