via Interesting Literature
This wonderful little-known poem from one of English literature’s greatest nature poets isn’t available online anywhere, so we’ve reproduced it below as the latest in our ‘Post A Poem A Day’ challenge. In the poem, John Clare (1793-1864) extols the virtue of home as a place to return to at the end of a hard day, a place of comfort and belonging. The poem’s form deftly reflects this, with the last line of each stanza returning to home – i.e. by ending on the very word ‘home’.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
‘Upon Appleton House’ is an example of a ‘country house poem’. Andrew Marvell (1621-78) wrote the poem for Thomas Fairfax, the father of the girl he was tutoring in the early 1650s, just after the end of the English Civil War, and the poem reflects many of the contemporary political issues of the mid-seventeenth century. ‘Appleton House’ is the Nun Appleton estate belonging to Fairfax in Yorkshire.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
‘Presentiment is that long Shadow on the Lawn’. Once again, as is so often the case with an Emily Dickinson poem, our attention is immediately arrested by a distinctive and provocative opening line. Something abstract, in this case the idea of presentiment, is given concrete form as an instantly visualised image. But what should we make of ‘Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn –’ (to reinstate Dickinson’s trademark dashes)? Below is the poem, along with some notes towards a (tentative) analysis.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
Robert Herrick (1591-1674), known as one of the ‘Cavalier poets’, was a Royalist who, following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I in 1649, penned this poem grieving for the loss of the king: ‘everything / Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing.’ For Herrick, the whole land seems to grieve for Charles and the loss to the kingdom that his death signifies.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
The Romantics were greatly interested in a quality that Edmund Burke called ‘the Sublime’: that peculiar mixture of awe and terror we feel when confronted with great forces of nature. Percy Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is a classic example of Romantic poetry about the Sublime – an ode to nature as a powerful and beautiful force. Shelley composed his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ during the summer of 1816, and it was first published in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which – beating Frankenstein by a year – was actually Mary’s first book.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
‘Snowdrop’ is a short poem by Ted Hughes (1930-98), perhaps the greatest nature poet writing in English during the entire twentieth century. Only Edward Thomas can match Hughes for the attention to detail and the powerful yet unsentimental treatment of the natural world (and notably, Hughes called Thomas ‘the father of us all’).
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
One of the first poems to respond to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this 1863 poem is a dramatic monologue, spoken by the native, Caliban, from the magical island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Setebos is the invented name for the deity Caliban worships, believing Setebos to be the Creator of all things (the name is mentioned in Shakespeare’s play; one surprising legacy is that one of the moons of the planet Uranus was named after Setebos).
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
This poem, ‘A Dirge’, is not one of Christina Rossetti’s absolute classics, but a phrase from it has had a new lease of life in the last few years: J. K. Rowling borrowed ‘the cuckoo’s calling’ from the poem and used it as the title for one of her novels. As its title suggests, ‘A Dirge’ is a poem of mourning about a loved one who has died.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
According to Thomas de Quincey, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) clocked up an estimated 180,000 miles during his lifetime, walking around his beloved Lake District (to say nothing of the Quantocks, where he lived near Coleridge during the 1790s). In this sonnet, ‘Sweet Was the Walk’, Wordsworth recalls a walk he took along a narrow lane at noon, and reflects on how the intervening years between childhood and adulthood have changed his view of the scene as he remembers it.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
The poet Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) was born in Boston to an Irish-Catholic father who was a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Her Catholic faith informs much of her poetry. ‘The Lights of London’, a sonnet which appeared in Guiney’s 1898 volume England and Yesterday, evokes London as night comes on, and was written around 20 years before the modernist T. S. Eliot began to write about similar scenes. ‘Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright / Prick door and window’ is a particularly acute observation.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment