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‘I Sing the Body Electric’ is perhaps Walt Whitman’s best-known poem, along with ‘Song of Myself’. ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ appeared in the original 1855 edition of Whitman’s collection, Leaves of Grass. It does what its title (added later) announces, with Whitman writing about his own body and its various components – but concluding that these are also part of his soul, since soul and body are one.
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A short song, ‘Ye Banks an’ Braes o’ Bonnie Doon’ (also known as ‘The Banks o’ Doon’) is a Robert Burns poem about looking at the natural world while one is full of worries and cares because one’s love has been untrue. The natural world continues to be fair and carefree, the birds sing merrily, but the speaker of the poem is filled with woe.
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The bells ring out for the New Year in this poem, ‘New Year’s Eve’, from A. E. Housman (1859-1936). But they are ‘ringing no tune’, and, ominously, ‘dead knells’. The poem doesn’t reflect new beginnings but rather the death throes of an old order: old religions, old kingdoms, old empires.
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Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was a fine Victorian poet and critic who also wrote the classic poem ‘Dover Beach’. ‘The Forsaken Merman’ is a less famous poem than that, but it’s an interesting narrative poem about – you guessed it – a merman (or ‘male mermaid’) who is forsaken by his lover.
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A Short Analysis of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’
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‘Mental Cases’ began life as a poem titled ‘The Deranged’ in late 1917, following Wilfred Owen’s famous meeting with fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon in Craiglockhart Hospital. Encouraged by Sassoon, and partly inspired by his fellow war poet’s poem ‘The Survivors’, Owen set about depicting the terrifying mental landscape of those men fighting in the trenches during the First World War. ‘Mental Cases’ is a powerful evocation and analysis of the psychological effects of the world’s first mass industrial war on the young men who experienced it.
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A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Moon was but a Chin of Gold’
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Emily Dickinson (1830-86) was one of the most distinctive poets of the nineteenth century. Of her contemporaries writing across the Atlantic at the same time as her, only Gerard Manley Hopkins, of the Victorian poets, comes close to matching her uniqueness and sharp eye for detail. Before the imagists, under Ezra Pound’s leadership, began to ‘make it new’, Emily Dickinson was forging exciting new and fresh metaphors to describe the world around her. ‘The Moon was but a Chin of Gold’ is a fine example of her idiosyncratic style.
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via Interesting Literature by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Infant Joy’ is a poem that was first published in William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence. Like many of Blake’s poems from the two Songs collections, ‘Infant Joy’ is fairly straightforward and its meaning is reasonably plain – and yet the poem requires a little analysis to tease out its deeper ambiguities and subtleties.
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‘Thou hast taught me, Silent River! / Many a lesson, deep and long; / Thou hast been a generous giver; / I can give thee but a song.’ In ‘To the River Charles’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), who is best known as the author of Hiawatha, praises the Charles river in Massachusetts.
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John Clare (1793-1864) is still a rather overlooked figure in English Romanticism and nature poetry, but he’s been called the greatest nature poet in English literature (by his biographer, Jonathan Bate). His poem ‘The Yellowhammer’s Nest’ shows Clare’s wonderful sensitivity to vowel sounds, as he explores the patterns found within nature by focusing on the nest of the bird, which is described as ‘poet-like’.
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‘When We Two Parted’ is one of the anthology favourites by a poet better known for his life than for his work. Although the poetry of Lord Byron (1788-1824) is still read and studied, how many people have read Don Juan from start to finish? It’s shorter poems, like the beautiful lyric ‘When We Two Parted’ that keep Byron’s work popular.
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