matchwood

The guns of the THUNDER CHILD sounded through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.

The chair went to matchwood at the bottom, and we rolled apart into the gutter.

The great stick was torn from his grasp and broken in two as though it had been matchwood, to be flung aside as the now infuriated beast charged for his adversary's throat.

When I remember how I've cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember I must stop here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled in a family Bible, why, I--"

The long-boat changed, as if by magic, into matchwood where she stood in her gripes.

In 1512, Spanish mercenaries made matchwood of Tuscan defences, the republic fell and the Medici returned.

Great trees were uprooted and split like matchwood, some falling over the trench.

Japan on Friday mourned the thousands who lost their lives in a massive earthquake and tsunami five years ago that turned towns to matchwood and triggered the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The physical descriptions are wonderful: "Jerome, AZ--a town that seemed to be made of matchwood and perched on a cliffside to spit in the face of gravity ...

Although the topos of the body as a ship is as familiar as the caged bird of the spirit, one important example joins the figure of the self as buffeted ship to another figurative register in Hopkins's poem, the "poor potsherd," the "matchwood" at the close of "That Nature" (1.

"Our overcoats are frozen hard and when some of the men tried to beat theirs to make them pliable to lie down in they split like matchwood.

Or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might have put it: 'this jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, IS immortal diamond.'