Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Motion

Power, in this line, doesn’t arrive as a flag planted in soil; it arrives as language seized and rewired. “You see the names of places roundabout?” opens like a casual aside, but it’s really a trap: the speaker directs your gaze, then claims ownership of what you’re seeing. Not the fields, not the houses - the names. Motion understands how place is held together by its labels, how a map can be a deed, and how possession often begins as a story you’re forced to repeat.

“They’re mine now” is bald, almost childishly direct, which is precisely why it bites. It mimics the blunt grammar of conquest and enclosure: no debate, no ceremony, just a transfer of rights asserted in a single sentence. The menace sharpens with the last clause. To “turn them inside out” suggests a violence that isn’t only physical. It’s the act of flipping a place’s meaning, exposing what was private, rebranding what was familiar, making the old coordinates unusable. Names become skins you can peel, invert, and wear differently.

The subtext is that control over geography is control over memory. If you can rename, you can erase; if you can “inside out” a place-name, you can make residents strangers in their own terrain. As a contemporary poet steeped in England’s dense layers of history, Motion is circling a particularly British anxiety: that the landscape is never just pastoral backdrop, it’s contested property, and the most efficient colonization happens in the mouth before it happens on the ground.