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How can we separate reality from illusion? What if, to quote from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream’?
‘A Dream within a Dream’ muses on the fragility and fleetingness of everything, and asks whether anything we do has any lasting or real effect. ‘A Dream within a Dream’ by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) is one of Poe’s best-known poems.
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In terms of having the longest wait for a posthumous poetic reputation to begin, the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-74) may take first prize. Over a century before Romanticism, Traherne describes how walking amongst nature can provide us with an appreciation of the beauty all around us. But Traherne’s poetry was not discovered and published until after Romanticism had had its heyday – his work began to appear in print in the early twentieth century!
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Agnes Mary Francis Robinson (1857-1944), also known as Agnes-Marie-François Darmesteter and approximately seven thousand other names during the course of her life, grew up with literature virtually in her blood: the family home was a salon frequented by William Morris and Arthur Symons, along with many leading Victorian artists.
A. Mary F. Robinson’s poetry is little-read now, which is a shame, as this fine sonnet, about the condition known as neurasthenia, attests. Although its title announces its subject as neurasthenia, Robinson’s evocation of what it’s like to feel cut off from the world around you by psychological and neurological illness chimes with many sufferers’ descriptions of the blackest moods experienced during depression.
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Written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history – the Peterloo Massacre, which Percy Shelley (1792-1822) also wrote about in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet – ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of Shelley’s best-known poems. The west wind is the wind that would carry Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he wanted to help fight for reform and revolution. The west wind thus becomes, before Harold Macmillan, a ‘wind of change’.
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Even those who aren’t familiar with Walt Whitman’s poems may recognise ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, thanks to its use in the 1989 Robin Williams film Dead Poets Society. Like another of Whitman’s poems, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘O Captain! My Captain’ was written in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, and is slightly different from much of Whitman’s best-known poetry in that it has a more regular rhyme scheme. The poem became among his best-known, to the extent that Whitman almost regretted writing it later.
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Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote powerfully about loneliness and solitude, and perhaps nowhere more movingly than ‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’, a poem about a loneliness so profound that we can’t even bring ourselves to confront it for fear of being overwhelmed. This loneliness is ‘The Horror not to be surveyed — / But skirted in the Dark — / With Consciousness suspended — / And Being under Lock’.
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Also known by its first line, ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’, ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’ (i.e. ‘for all that’) laments the fact that equality does not exist among men. The poem ends with the heartfelt call ‘That man to man the world o’er, / Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poem was sung at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
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‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a narrative poem by John Keats (1795-1821) told using the Spenserian stanza, the nine-line verse form Edmund Spenser developed for his vast sixteenth-century epic, The Faerie Queene. On a cold night in a medieval castle, a young lover breaks into his sweetheart’s chamber, hides in her closet, and then persuades her semi-conscious self to run away with him.
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‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ belongs to a small suite of poems William Wordsworth wrote about ‘Lucy’, a girl or young woman (her precise age is difficult to determine); along with ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (which does not mention Lucy by name) and ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, ‘Strange fits of passion’ appeared in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the volume Wordsworth co-wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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The most remarkable thing about this poem, ‘Ode on Solitude’, is that Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote it when he was just 12 years old! A paean to the simple life and a world of peace and quiet, ‘Ode on Solitude’ was an extraordinarily precocious poem by a poet who would go on to define the poetic tastes of the first half of the eighteenth century with longer works such as The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. This poem was written just as that century was dawning, in 1700.
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