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On one of Hardy’s best-known poems – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a prolific poet, with his Complete Poems running to 1,000 pages. Yet he’s not generally known for being a satirical poet. ‘The Ruined Maid’, one of his earliest and best-known poems, is a rare example of Thomas Hardy’s satirical verse. And although we don’t tend to associate Hardy with satirical writing, one of his later volumes of poetry was called Satires of Circumstance – combining the ironic genre of satire with one of Hardy’s favourite words. Written in 1866, ‘The Ruined Maid’ was only published in 1901, in Hardy’s second collection, Poems of the Past and Present. Before some analysis, here’s the poem.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by S. Abbas Raza
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via Interesting Literature by Dr Oliver Tearle
Rupert Brooke wrote ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ in May 1912, while he was staying in Germany. Before we offer a summary of the fifth verse paragraphs which make up the poem, you might want to read the poem first, and keep the tab containing the text of the poem in a separate window (we find this useful anyway, when reading about longer poems). You can read ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ here.
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I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed this poem.
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via Interesting Literature by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Infant Sorrow’ is the counterpart to ‘Infant Joy’: whereas ‘Infant Joy’ appeared in William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence, ‘Infant Sorrow’ was published in his 1794 volume Songs of Experience. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘Infant Sorrow’.
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A reminder? I have never seen this poem before so an introduction it definitely was!
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry
The Battle of the Blackwater was real and not just something that happened in Game of Thrones. It’s an odd fact that the first great poem written in English about a real battle is about a resounding defeat for the English. For ‘English’ here we need to think ‘Anglo-Saxon’, but then we have to go back nearly a century before the Norman invasion, to the year 991, and the Battle of Maldon to find the inspiration for English literature’s first great battle-poem. And according to the contemporary chroniclers, the Battle of Maldon ended in humiliating defeat for the Angles and Saxons: one chronicle claims that the English had to pay the Viking victors some ‘x thusend punda’. Yes, that’s ten thousand pounds – a colossal sum, and the first example of the English ‘natives’ paying the Vikings Danegeld, money paid in tribute to make their bearded and saga-singing aggressors go away, basically.
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‘The Night was wide, and furnished scant’: not one of Emily Dickinson’s most memorable opening lines, but it opens a curious poem which is worth closer analysis.
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‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was originally the name of an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem about a cruel woman, but the title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is more commonly associated with John Keats’s poem which tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was more fairy than human (you know the sort of thing), lured back to her cave, and then abandoned on the cold hillside. The poem inspired the title of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking 1962 work of environmentalism, Silent Spring, from the line of Keats’s poem, ‘And no birds sing.’
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the remarkable modernist poem, Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land is often quoted, especially every time that spring month comes around again. But three years before the publication of Eliot’s poem, a woman named Helen Hope Mirrlees was writing a poem, simply titled Paris: A Poem, which strikingly anticipates many elements of The Waste Land, including the focus on April not as a month of hope and rebirth, but as a time of cruelty and wickedness. Eliot: ‘April is the cruellest month.’ Mirrlees: ‘The wicked April moon.’ A poetic revolution was in the (spring) air.
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Written in October 1961 as she was beginning to find her own distinctive poetic voice, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ is one of the most widely discussed and analysed of Sylvia Plath’s poems. This is perhaps inevitable, in a poem which is so loaded with symbols; our instinct as readers, and as literary critics, is to decode the symbol or discover what the poem really ‘means’
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‘The Solitary Reaper’ is one of Wordsworth’s best-known poems. Although it’s a ballad, it didn’t appear in Wordsworth’s most famous collection, Lyrical Ballads, because he wrote it after the publication of that volume (co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in 1798. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ appeared in Wordsworth’s 1807 collection Poems in Two Volumes. The poem has received a fair bit of critical analysis; here, we offer some notes towards a commentary on it.
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