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‘Telegraph Wires’ belongs to Ted Hughes’s middle-late period, before the publication of Birthday Letters shortly before his death in 1998 but after his classic earlier work such as ‘The Thought-Fox’, Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’, and, of course, Crow. Published in 1989 in his collection Wolfwatching, ‘Telegraph Wires’ requires some close textual analysis to untangle some of its language and imagery.
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The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales is one of the most powerful and evocative poems about spring in all of English literature, from its first reference to the rejuvenating qualities of April showers through to the zodiacal allusions to Aries (the Ram). Here it is, in the original Middle English: a time machine taking us back to a spring more than six centuries ago.
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‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem from William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘The Little Black Boy’.
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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is not now principally known for his poetry (indeed, it might be said that he is still less famous for his writings than he is for … having been Oscar Wilde), and his one enduringly famous poem is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. However, early in his career he wrote more poetry than anything else, and ‘Easter Day’ is one of his finest verses – a nice sonnet about Rome on Easter Day.
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Festus Claudius McKay (1889-1948), better known as Claude McKay, was a Jamaican-American writer and an important poet in the Harlem Renaissance which also included Langston Hughes. McKay was an atheist (‘a pagan’, as he himself puts it), but one who could enjoy the scent of the Easter lily though he cannot believe in the Easter story. This is what ‘The Easter Flower’ is about.
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‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it. Although ‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ is not perhaps the opening line of Emily Dickinson’s that most readily springs to readers’ minds, the poem is worthy of close analysis.
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Written in the early 1580s, Astrophil and Stella is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature, and sees Sidney exploring his own life-that-might-have-been with Penelope Rich (whom he turned down), through the invented semi-autobiographical figures of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’) and ‘Stella’ (‘star’). Sonnet 41, which begins ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance’, may have been inspired by a real-life tournament at Whitehall in May 1581, and sees Astrophil attributing his success as a jouster and horseman to Stella, who ‘Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.’
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Like many of her poems, including her mature poems from her late period, ‘Elm’ is an obscure Sylvia Plath poem which resists straightforward analysis. Plath’s complex and ambiguous use of symbolism renders ‘Elm’, if not impenetrable, then at the very least, challenging.
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Wordsworth’s great collaborator on the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written in 1798, the same year that Lyrical Ballads appeared, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a night-time meditation on childhood and raising children, offered in a conversational manner and focusing on several key themes of Romantic poetry: the formative importance of childhood and the way it shapes who we become, and the role nature can play in our lives.
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‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is not one of William Wordsworth’s best-known poems. First published in the landmark 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth co-authored with Coleridge, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is narrated by a father who recalls going for a walk with his young son, and coming to realise that the boy’s innocence contains more wisdom than the father’s senior years. ‘A father can learn from his son, too’ might be a concise way of summarising this poem.
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