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‘To Sleep’, a sonnet by one of the leading second-generation Romantic poets, John Keats (1795-1821), addresses sleep as a ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight’. Sleep allows us to escape our own minds, when one’s conscience begins to prick us, keeping us awake. Sleep wraps us up in lovely delicious rest, and allows us to forget the world.
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One of the 63 poems that make up A. E. Housman’s most famous volume of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896), the poem beginning ‘In My Own Shire, If I Was Sad’ is written in rhyming couplets and is about the change the ‘Shropshire lad’ feels when he moves from his rural home to the bustling metropolis of London. Suddenly, he is surrounded by a sea of people, none of them cares for him – he is in a city of millions of souls, but has never felt more alone.
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‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ is a poem that has been popular with readers ever since it was published in 1588 in William Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets, & Songs. Yet the authorship of ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ is by no means certain. Who wrote it? First, here’s the poem, which expresses the sentiment that one’s own mind contains a whole world, and, indeed – as Emily Dickinson would later also express – more than the world, since the only limit on it is the limit of our own imagination, or what we are able to conceive of.
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Published in Blake’s 1789 book Songs of Innocence, ‘A Dream’ is about William Blake’s vision of three insects: an ant (‘emmet’), a beetle, and a glow-worm, which is in fact a kind of beetle. Not only that, but these are talking insects: the emmet confides that she has lost her children, and the bright glow-worm offers to light the way for her through the night, so she can recover them.
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‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by W. H. Auden (1907-73) was written in 1939, following the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in January of that year. As well as being an elegy for the dead poet, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ is also a meditation on the role and place of poetry in the modern world. What is poetry for? Can it make anything happen? Should it make anything happen?
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Philip Larkin once recalled hearing William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ recited on BBC radio, and having to pull over to the side of the road, as his eyes had filled with tears. ‘Intimations of Immortality’ remains a powerful meditation on death, the loss of childhood innocence, and the way we tend to get further away from ourselves – our true roots and our beliefs – as we grow older.
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A Short Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mother o’ Mine’
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‘Mother o’ Mine’ was published as a dedication to Kipling’s 1892 book The Light That Failed. Like many of Kipling’s greatest poems, it’s song-like, lending itself to being read or even sung or chanted aloud. It’s also a fine poem about a poet paying tribute to his mother.
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Just as rivers flow into the sea, so brooks flow into larger rivers, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) highlights in this charming poem, ‘The Brook’: ‘And out again I curve and flow / To join the brimming river, / For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.’
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What if you were dreaming about someone, only to be woken up by the very person you had been dreaming about? This scenario is the focus of this lesser-known John Donne poem, ‘The Dream’, which – as in a number of other John Donne poems – sees the poet trying to seduce the woman to sleeping with him…
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discovers the epic poets who wrote continuations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
When I began this column back in May last year, it was intended to be an online extension of my first book for a general audience, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History. Just as that book had arisen out of this very blog, so it returned to the blog, its natural home. The blog, and the book, are dedicated to rootling about in a mythical and entirely virtual ‘secret library’ containing all sorts of books and other texts that have been lost, forgotten, or never received their due. And although occasionally I’ve turned my thoughts to more familiar titles, unearthing the little-known sides to them, for the most part this column has concerned itself with the ‘lost’ works among literature, whatever that might signify. And they don’t come much more lost than the Cyclic poets.
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