greykit.poetry
-
1928
[robert-frost]
Acquainted with the Night
A terza rima walk past the watchman and the saddest city lane, stopping at an interrupted cry that was not for him, under a luminary clock that proclaims the time neither wrong nor right.
-
1928
[w-b-yeats]
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow, and the whole Trojan war folded into it — the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead — closing on the question of whether she put on his knowledge with his power.
-
1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
-
1925
[t-s-eliot]
The Hollow Men
In five sections the hollow men inhabit death's dream kingdom — paralysed force, gesture without motion — circling the prickly pear as the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.
-
1923
[robert-frost]
Fire and Ice
Nine lines that weigh desire against hate as ways for the world to end, and find ice would suffice.
-
1923
[robert-frost]
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold and her hardest hue to hold: leaf subsides to leaf, Eden sinks to grief, dawn goes down to day.
-
1923
[robert-frost]
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
A pause between the woods and frozen lake on the darkest evening of the year, the horse shaking its bells at the strangeness of it — lovely, dark and deep, and set against promises and miles to go before sleep.
-
1922
[t-s-eliot]
The Waste Land
Eliot's fractured masterpiece in five parts — voices from the ruins of post-war Europe, the Fisher King, the Thames, a game of chess, the fire sermon — ending in the Sanskrit peace of Shantih shantih shantih.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Dulce et Decorum Est
Owen's soldiers march exhausted through sludge; a gas attack takes one too slow with his helmet; the speaker inverts Horace's old lie — you would not glorify war if you had watched this man drown in his own lungs.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Exposure
Not the guns but the weather is the enemy — merciless iced east winds that knife them, sentries whispering, dawn massing in the east — and after every stanza the same shrug: but nothing happens.
-
1920
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends — four lines that concede the night is short and refuse to care, because of the light.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Futility
Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?
-
1920
[t-s-eliot]
Gerontion
An old man in a dry month speaks his meditation on history, faith, and the failure of knowledge — thought without action, passion lost, a dry brain in a dry season.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Insensibility
Happy are men who can lose imagination — the ode works through every kind of merciful deadening the front supplies, then curses those who by choice made themselves immune to the eternal reciprocity of tears.
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1920
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
Second Fig
Two lines setting the ugly house safe upon its rock against the shining palace built upon the sand — and preferring the sand.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Strange Meeting
Escaping down a tunnel out of battle, the speaker meets a sleeper who springs up and turns out to be the man he killed — and who mourns not his own death but the truth untold, the pity of war, the pity war distilled.
-
1920
[w-b-yeats]
The Second Coming
The widening gyre of history unravels ceremony and conviction; out of Spiritus Mundi a rough beast with lion body and human head slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
The Send-off
A draft entrained in secret, sung down the close darkening lanes and wreathed as if already a corpse — and the question of how many will come back, up half-known roads, to village wells.
-
1919
[rudyard-kipling]
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Kipling’s bleak parable — the plain truths you can deny, ignore, or outlaw, but never escape.
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1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
Everything mortal does one thing — selves, goes itself, cries What I do is me — and the sestet turns that on the just man, in whose limbs and eyes Christ plays in ten thousand places.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Binsey Poplars
My aspens dear, all felled — and the grief is not only for the trees but for how easily a country scene is unmade: ten or twelve strokes and the sweet especial scene is gone.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Carrion Comfort
One of the terrible sonnets: a refusal to feast on despair, and a wrestling match with a lion-limbed God that the speaker only afterwards realises he was cheering — that night, that year of now done darkness, I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Felix Randal
A priest's elegy for a farrier he anointed — the big-boned and hardy-handsome man broken by sickness, tears touched by a child's touch, and at the last the great grey drayhorse and the bright and battering sandal.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
-
1918
[carl-sandburg]
Grass
Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres and Verdun are shovelled under and the grass gets to work — until the passengers no longer know what place this is. I am the grass. Let me work.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.
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1916
[robert-frost]
Birches
Ice storms bend the birches for good, but the poet would rather believe a boy did it — and wants the same for himself: to climb toward heaven until the tree sets him down again, since earth's the right place for love.
-
1916
[w-b-yeats]
Easter, 1916
Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — men he had passed with a nod, transformed utterly by their sacrifice into a terrible beauty that is born.
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1916
[carl-sandburg]
Fog
Six lines: the fog comes on little cat feet, sits on silent haunches looking over harbor and city, and moves on.
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1916
[robert-frost]
The Road Not Taken
Two roads in a yellow wood, worn really about the same, and one taken for no better reason than that it had to be — with the sigh and the difference reserved for a telling ages and ages hence.
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1915
[t-s-eliot]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Prufrock's hesitant interior monologue circles a visit never quite made — measuring life in coffee spoons, hearing the mermaids sing, asking "Do I dare?" — a portrait of paralysis and the fear of the overwhelming question.
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1914
[robert-frost]
After Apple-Picking
The ladder still points at heaven and a barrel stands unfilled, but the picker is done — drowsing through a pane of hoary ice, magnified apples appearing and disappearing, unsure whether the coming sleep is the woodchuck's or just human sleep.
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1914
[thomas-hardy]
Channel Firing
Gunnery practice in April 1914 wakes the dead, who take it for Judgement Day; God tells them it is only the world making red war redder — and the sound carries inland to Stourton Tower, Camelot, and Stonehenge.
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1914
[carl-sandburg]
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World — the charges of wickedness, crookedness and brutality are all admitted, and then thrown back as a boast: a tall bold slugger laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth.
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1914
[robert-frost]
Mending Wall
Two men walk the line each spring putting back the stones that winter and hunters threw down. One keeps saying good fences make good neighbours; the other keeps wondering what he was walling in or walling out.
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1912
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
Renascence
Written at nineteen: the horizon presses down until the whole of infinity and all the world's suffering pours through her, she is buried and prays for rain — and comes back up into a world whose sky is no wider than the soul.
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1912
[thomas-hardy]
The Convergence of the Twain
Hardy's cold meditation on the Titanic and the iceberg, grown in shadowy distance as twin halves of one august event, until the Spinner of the Years said "Now!" and jarred two hemispheres.
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1910
[rudyard-kipling]
If—
A father’s litany of self-mastery — the whole world for the price of composure.
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1910
[rudyard-kipling]
The Way Through the Woods
A road the forest swallowed — and the ghosts you can almost hear still riding it.
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1906
[rudyard-kipling]
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Empires bloom and fall like flowers — each blossom certain its brief season is forever.
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1904
[christina-rossetti]
In the Bleak Midwinter
Earth hard as iron, water like a stone — what can she give the Lord God in the bleak midwinter? Only what she can: give my heart.
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1903
[rudyard-kipling]
Boots
The hypnotic, maddening tramp of infantry on an endless route-march (“Infantry Columns”).
-
1902
[rudyard-kipling]
Sussex
A lover’s map of the South Downs — “Yea, Sussex by the sea!”
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1902
[thomas-hardy]
The Darkling Thrush
On the last evening of the century, Hardy leans on a gate in a desolate frost-gray landscape when a frail old thrush flings out a full-hearted evensong — suggesting some blessed hope the poet cannot share.
-
1902
[rudyard-kipling]
The Islanders
A savage rebuke to a complacent England — “the flannelled fools at the wicket … the muddied oafs at the goals.”
-
1902
[thomas-hardy]
The Man He Killed
A soldier tries to explain why he shot a man he would have stood a drink in any old inn — and gets no further than because he was my foe, quaint and curious as war is.
-
1899
[w-b-yeats]
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Eight lines: having neither the heavens' embroidered cloths nor anything but dreams, he spreads the dreams under her feet and asks her to tread softly.
-
1899
[paul-laurence-dunbar]
Sympathy
I know why the caged bird sings — not for joy but because the bars have cut his wings and his song is a prayer flung up from the heart's deep core.
-
1899
[w-b-yeats]
The Song of Wandering Aengus
A silver trout caught in a hazel wood turns into a glimmering girl and vanishes; the rest is an old man's whole life spent walking after her, to pluck the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun.
-
1899
[rudyard-kipling]
The White Man’s Burden
Kipling’s notorious exhortation to the United States to take up colonial rule of the Philippines.
-
1898
[thomas-hardy]
Hap
A vengeful god would at least be an answer; what the poem finds instead is Crass Casualty and dicing Time, purblind Doomsters who had as readily strown blisses about the pilgrimage as pain.
-
1898
[thomas-hardy]
Neutral Tones
By a winter pond under a white, chidden sun, Hardy distills the death of a love into a few grey images — the starving sod, the deadest smile, the God-curst sun — that return to him whenever love proves a deceiver.
-
1898
[oscar-wilde]
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Wilde's long narrative poem in six cantos about the hanging of a soldier at Reading Gaol — anchored in the refrain that each man kills the thing he loves, by each let this be heard.
-
1897
[rudyard-kipling]
Recessional
A hymn against imperial pride, written for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
-
1896
[emily-dickinson]
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
In the stillness before death, eyes dry, breaths gathering for the last onset — and then a fly interposes with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz between the light and me, and the windows failed.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
Into my heart an air that kills
The blue remembered hills of the land of lost content, shining plain from far away — and the flat admission that closes it: I cannot come again.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Counting his threescore years and ten, the speaker finds fifty springs too few to see the cherry hung with bloom and snow — and resolves to go about the woodlands now.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
The same gale that troubles Wenlock Edge blew through a Roman at Uricon: the tree of man was never quiet, and the gale of life will soon be through this one too.
-
1896
[rudyard-kipling]
The Song of the Banjo
The brash, portable music that follows the soldier and settler to the ends of the Empire.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
To an Athlete Dying Young
A Shropshire lad mourns a young runner carried home shoulder-high in triumph, and again shoulder-high in death — lucky, Housman suggests, to slip away before the garland withers and the name outlives the fame.
-
1896
[paul-laurence-dunbar]
We Wear the Mask
The mask that grins and lies is the debt paid to human guile — let the world count only the smiles, while the clay is vile beneath the feet and the long mile stretches on.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
When I was one-and-twenty
A young man ignores the wise man's counsel to keep his heart free — and finds out at two-and-twenty that 't is true, 't is true.
-
1896
[a-e-housman]
With rue my heart is laden
Eight lines for the golden friends and the light-foot boys and rose-lipt girls, laid by brooks too broad for leaping and in fields where roses fade.
-
1892
[rudyard-kipling]
Gentlemen-Rankers
The lament of well-born men sunk to the ranks — “poor little lambs who’ve lost our way.”
-
1892
[w-b-yeats]
When You Are Old
Told to a woman who is still young: one day, nodding by the fire, take down this book and remember that one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and the sorrows of your changing face.
-
1891
[emily-dickinson]
Hope" is the thing with feathers—
Hope — the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, sings without words, and never stops — sweetest in the gale, asking never a crumb of me.
-
1891
[emily-dickinson]
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm nobody! Who are you? — if there's a pair of us, don't tell; how dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog.
-
1890
[emily-dickinson]
Because I could not stop for Death—
Death comes as a courteous gentleman who drives the poet past schoolchildren at play, gazing grain, and a house that seems a swelling of the ground, until centuries feel shorter than a single day.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Danny Deever
A hanging at dawn, told in the whispers of the men paraded to watch it.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Ford o’ Kabul River
A cavalryman grieves the mate he lost fording the river in the dark.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Fuzzy-Wuzzy
A soldier’s backhanded salute to the Sudanese warrior who broke the British square.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Gunga Din
A soldier’s rough tribute to the native water-carrier who outdid them all.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Mandalay
A time-expired soldier in grey London aches for Burma, a girl, and the road east.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Screw-Guns
A mountain-battery gunner’s swagger from the passes of the North-West Frontier.
-
1890
[w-b-yeats]
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Yeats's longing for the simple life on Innisfree — a cabin, nine bean-rows, a hive for the honey-bee — heard even in the deep heart's core while standing on city pavements.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
The Widow at Windsor
The Empire’s long reach, sung by the men who garrison it for “the Widow” — Queen Victoria.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
The Young British Soldier
A grizzled veteran’s blunt, brutal advice to the raw recruit shipped out East.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Tommy
The soldier scorned in peacetime and cheered in war answers back.
-
1889
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Crossing the Bar
Tennyson's valedictory lyric — written in a single sitting, placed by his own wish at the close of every volume of his work — hopes for no mourning when the tide bears him out, and to see his Pilot face to face.
-
1889
[oscar-wilde]
Symphony in Yellow
Twelve lines of London seen as colour: an omnibus crawling like a yellow butterfly, barges like shifting yellow hay, elm leaves falling yellow — and the Thames at his feet like a rod of rippled jade.
-
1889
[rudyard-kipling]
The Ballad of East and West
A border horse-thief and a colonel’s son meet as enemies and part as blood-brothers.
-
1887
[robert-louis-stevenson]
Requiem
Stevenson's eight-line epitaph for himself — under the wide and starry sky, glad did I live and gladly die; home is the sailor; home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
-
1885
[robert-louis-stevenson]
From a Railway Carriage
Faster than fairies, faster than witches — bridges, hedges, painted stations, a child gathering brambles, a tramp, a mill and a river: each a glimpse and gone for ever.
-
1885
[robert-louis-stevenson]
The Swing
A child swings up in the air so blue — over the wall, over the countryside, down on the garden green — and up in the air and down.
-
1883
[emma-lazarus]
The New Colossus
Not the brazen giant of Greek fame but a Mother of Exiles with a torch, whose silent lips ask for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free — the lines later cast on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.
-
1881
[oscar-wilde]
Impression du Matin
A Thames nocturne of blue and gold changed to a harmony in grey as the fog lifts and the city wakes — and one woman still under the gas lamps, with lips of flame and heart of stone.
-
1881
[oscar-wilde]
Requiescat
Wilde's elegy for his sister Isola, who died aged nine — tread lightly, speak gently; all her bright golden hair tarnished with rust, all his life's buried here.
-
1878
[emily-dickinson]
Success is counted sweetest
Only those who never succeed can define success — not the purple host that took the flag, but the defeated dying man who hears the distant strains of triumph break agonized and clear.
-
1875
[edgar-allan-poe]
Alone
From childhood's hour, unable to take his passions from a common spring — the mystery that binds him still drawn from every depth of good and ill, and a demon in the cloud that took the form of a view.
-
1868
[walt-whitman]
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A spider on a promontory flinging filament out of itself into vacant space, and the soul doing the same — ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, till the gossamer thread catches somewhere.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto I
Canto I of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto II
Canto II of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto III
Canto III of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto IV
Canto IV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto IX
Canto IX of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto V
Canto V of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto VI
Canto VI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto VII
Canto VII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto VIII
Canto VIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto X
Canto X of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XI
Canto XI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XII
Canto XII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XIII
Canto XIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XIV
Canto XIV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XIX
Canto XIX of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XV
Canto XV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XVI
Canto XVI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XVII
Canto XVII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XX
Canto XX of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXI
Canto XXI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXII
Canto XXII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXIX
Canto XXIX of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXV
Canto XXV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXVIII
Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXX
Canto XXX of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXXII
Canto XXXII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXXIII
Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Inferno, Canto XXXIV
Canto XXXIV of the Inferno, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto I
Canto I of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto II
Canto II of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto III
Canto III of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto IV
Canto IV of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto IX
Canto IX of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto V
Canto V of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto VI
Canto VI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto VII
Canto VII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto VIII
Canto VIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto X
Canto X of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XI
Canto XI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XII
Canto XII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XIII
Canto XIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XIV
Canto XIV of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XIX
Canto XIX of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XV
Canto XV of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XVI
Canto XVI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XVII
Canto XVII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XX
Canto XX of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXI
Canto XXI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXII
Canto XXII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXIX
Canto XXIX of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXV
Canto XXV of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXVIII
Canto XXVIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXX
Canto XXX of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXXII
Canto XXXII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Paradiso, Canto XXXIII
Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto I
Canto I of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto II
Canto II of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto III
Canto III of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto IV
Canto IV of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto IX
Canto IX of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto V
Canto V of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto VI
Canto VI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto VII
Canto VII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto VIII
Canto VIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto X
Canto X of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XI
Canto XI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XII
Canto XII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XIII
Canto XIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XIV
Canto XIV of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XIX
Canto XIX of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XV
Canto XV of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XVI
Canto XVI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XVII
Canto XVII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XX
Canto XX of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXI
Canto XXI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXII
Canto XXII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXIX
Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXV
Canto XXV of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII
Canto XXVIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXX
Canto XXX of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXXII
Canto XXXII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1867
[dante]
Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII
Canto XXXIII of the Purgatorio, from Longfellow's verse Divine Comedy.
-
1866
[emily-dickinson]
A narrow fellow in the grass
A snake described entirely by how it moves and how it is missed — a whip lash unbraiding in the sun — and met, unlike Nature's other people, with tighter breathing and zero at the bone.
-
1865
[walt-whitman]
O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman's elegy for Lincoln as fallen ship's captain — the voyage won and the port in sight, but the Captain lies cold and dead on the deck while the crowds exult on shore.
-
1865
[walt-whitman]
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln — the lilac's perennial bloom, the drooping western star, and the hermit thrush singing death's carol in the swamps; the poem that transformed a president's death into a national rite of mourning.
-
1864
[robert-browning]
Prospice
Written after his wife's death: no wish for the bandage or the creeping past — he would fare like his peers, take the last worst of it fighting, and have the black minute end in her breast, and peace out of pain.
-
1863
[william-blake]
Auguries of Innocence
Blake's great chain of auguries — 132 lines of compressed vision reading the infinite in the finite: a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wildflower, and the tyranny we inflict on the smallest creatures reverberating through all of human life.
-
1862
[christina-rossetti]
A Better Resurrection
No wit, no words, no tears; a heart like a stone, a faded leaf, a broken bowl — each stanza handing the ruin over to be remade: cast in the fire the perished thing, and melt and remould it.
-
1862
[christina-rossetti]
Goblin Market
Laura succumbs to the goblin merchants' enchanted fruit and wastes away; her sister Lizzie braves the goblins to win the antidote and save her — a narrative poem of temptation, sacrifice, and the redemptive bond between sisters.
-
1862
[christina-rossetti]
Remember
Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.
-
1862
[christina-rossetti]
Up-Hill
A traveller's questions and a steady voice answering: the road winds uphill all the way, the journey takes the whole long day, and yes — there will be beds for all who come.
-
1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
-
1861
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
Paul Revere’s Ride
One if by land, and two if by sea — the signal lanterns in the North Church tower, the muffled oars across the Charles, and the midnight gallop through Medford, Lexington and Concord that woke the countryside.
-
1860
[walt-whitman]
I Hear America Singing
Whitman hears the varied carols of America — carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker — each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.
-
1855
[walt-whitman]
Song of Myself
Whitman's great democratic epic — celebrating himself, and through himself, every atom of every person — sprawling across 52 sections from the grass at his feet to the spotted hawk's yawp over the roofs of the world.
-
1854
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Tennyson's galloping tribute to the doomed cavalry charge at Balaclava — half a league onward into the valley of Death, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
-
1850
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
In Memoriam A.H.H. (selections)
Selections from Tennyson's great elegiac sequence for Arthur Henry Hallam — spanning the Prologue's address to "Strong Son of God," the dark-house vigil of canto VII, the faith-and-doubt crisis of cantos LIV–LVI, the Ring Out Wild Bells of CVI, and the wedding Epilogue that closes the seventeen-year mourning with new life.
-
1850
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
Sonnet 43: How Do I Love Thee?
Barrett Browning counts the ways she loves her husband — to the depth, breadth, and height her soul can reach, with passion, purity, childhood faith, and all her life's breath.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
A Dream within a Dream
Poe asks whether a life lived as a dream is therefore less real — then stands on a surf-tormented shore, watching the golden sands slip through his fingers, unable to save even one grain from the pitiless wave.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Annabel Lee
Poe's last poem — a love that began in a kingdom by the sea, that the winged seraphs envied, that no angels in heaven above nor demons under the sea can ever dissever.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Eldorado
A gallant knight grows old riding after Eldorado, and is finally told by a pilgrim shadow where to look: over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
The Bells
Four movements in sound — silver sleigh-bells, golden wedding-bells, brazen alarm-bells, iron tolling-bells — rising from merriment through alarm to the Ghouls' runic rhyme and the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
-
1848
[john-keats]
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Fear of dying before the pen has gleaned the teeming brain, and of never again looking on the fair creature of an hour — resolved by standing alone on the shore of the wide world until love and fame sink to nothing.
-
1847
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Tears, Idle Tears
Tears that rise from no known grief but from looking at happy autumn fields and thinking of the days that are no more — fresh as first beams, sad as the last, deep as first love, wild with all regret.
-
1845
[robert-browning]
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
An exile's longing for an English April — the elm-tree bole in tiny leaf, the chaffinch on the orchard bough, the wise thrush singing each song twice over, the first fine careless rapture.
-
1845
[robert-browning]
Meeting at Night
Grey sea, long black land, a boat pushed into slushy sand, three fields crossed to a farm — and the whole approach discharged in a tap at the pane, a scratched match, and two hearts beating each to each.
-
1845
[edgar-allan-poe]
The City in the Sea
Death has reared himself a throne in a strange city far down within the dim West, where no heaven-light reaches and no wind disturbs the melancholy waters — until Hell itself shall rise to do that sunken city reverence.
-
1845
[edgar-allan-poe]
The Raven
A grieving man is visited at midnight by a raven who answers every question with the one word "Nevermore," driving him to the edge of madness over his lost Lenore.
-
1843
[edgar-allan-poe]
Lenore
A mourner refuses to sing a dirge for Lenore — who died so young, doubly dead — and rebukes those who loved her for wealth and hated her for pride; the poem closes with a defiant pæan, sending the angel up to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven.
-
1843
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
The Cry of the Children
A protest poem on child labor in the mines and factories of England — the children weeping in the playtime of the others, dying before their time, their sob cursing deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath.
-
1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Break, Break, Break
Waves break on cold gray stones — the fisherman's boy shouts, the sailor lad sings, the stately ships go on, but the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.
-
1842
[robert-browning]
My Last Duchess
A Duke of Ferrara shows an envoy a portrait of his late wife, revealing through oblique self-justification that he had her killed for being too easily pleased by anyone — then turns the conversation to the terms of his next marriage.
-
1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
The Lady of Shalott
Imprisoned in her island tower by a mysterious curse, the Lady of Shalott weaves the world in a mirror until Sir Lancelot's bright passage compels her to look directly at Camelot — and die.
-
1842
[robert-browning]
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
A child's story — the Pied Piper clears Hamelin of its rats for a thousand guilders, the Mayor refuses to pay, and the Piper leads all the town's children away through a mountain door that closes behind them forever.
-
1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Ulysses
The aged Ulysses speaks from Ithaca, chafing against an idle kingship and rallying his mariners for one last voyage beyond the western stars — to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-
1840
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
The Village Blacksmith
Under a spreading chestnut-tree, a man who owes not any man — the ringing bellows, the children coming home from school, the daughter's voice in the village choir, and a life read back as a lesson wrought at the sounding forge.
-
1840
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
The Wreck of the Hesperus
A skipper who laughs at the old sailor's warning takes his little daughter into the hurricane, lashes her to the mast, and is found with her frozen on the breakers of Norman's Woe.
-
1838
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
A Psalm of Life
Life is real, life is earnest — a refusal of the dream of numbers and the grave as goal, urging footprints on the sands of time and a heart for any fate: still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
-
1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
-
1836
[robert-browning]
Porphyria's Lover
A lover tells how Porphyria came in from the storm, laid her hair on his cheek and whispered she loved him — and he strangled her with it, to hold that perfect moment forever; all night they sat, and yet God has not said a word.
-
1832
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
The Masque of Anarchy
Written in response to the Peterloo Massacre (1819), in which cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reformers in Manchester — Shelley's furious call for non-violent resistance, cataloguing the allegorical figures of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy and ending with the clarion "Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.
-
1830
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Mariana
A moated grange going to rot around a woman who cannot stop waiting — every stanza closing on the same refusal to arrive: He cometh not, she said; I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead.
-
1830
[lord-byron]
So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Written at twenty-nine after the Venice carnival, Byron's three spare stanzas bid farewell to midnight roving — the sword outwears the sheath, and love itself must rest.
-
1821
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Adonais
Shelley's pastoral elegy for John Keats in 55 Spenserian stanzas — mourning the death of genius at the hands of hostile critics, tracing the mourning of Urania and Keats's fellow-poets, and arriving at the vision of Adonais absorbed into the eternal One, a star beaconing from the abode where the Eternal are.
-
1821
[lord-byron]
The Isles of Greece
A poem-within-a-poem sung by the anachronistic bard at Lambro's island feast — sixteen stanzas lamenting the fallen glory of Greece, invoking Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae, and urging the living not to drown their shame in Samian wine but to reclaim their inheritance.
-
1820
[john-keats]
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A knight-at-arms palely loitering tells how a faery's child lulled him to cold-hill sleep, where pale kings warned — La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.
-
1820
[john-keats]
Ode on Melancholy
Do not go to Lethe: the cure would kill the thing worth having. Melancholy lives in the temple of Delight itself, and only whoever can burst Joy's grape against a fine palate ever tastes her sadness.
-
1820
[john-keats]
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Meditating on the frozen figures of an ancient urn, Keats finds that unheard melodies surpass the heard, and that the urn's last lesson to man is that beauty and truth are one.
-
1820
[john-keats]
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats follows a nightingale's song out of the mortal world into an immortal darkness, then wakes to find the vision fled — was it a dream or a waking?
-
1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ode to the West Wind
In five linked terza rima sonnets, Shelley invokes the autumn West Wind — destroyer and preserver — begging it to scatter his words over the earth as seeds of prophecy.
-
1820
[john-keats]
To Autumn
Three stanzas address Autumn as a season and a presence — first as conspirer with the sun, then as a harvest figure at rest, and finally as maker of its own music in the dying day.
-
1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
To a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit — a bird that is heard and never seen, chased through simile after simile (poet, high-born maiden, glow-worm, rose) because no human joy is unmixed enough to explain it.
-
1819
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, princes who are the dregs of their dull race, a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field — a catalogue of graves from which a glorious Phantom may burst.
-
1818
[lord-byron]
Apostrophe to the Ocean
Seven Spenserian stanzas from the close of Canto IV — Byron's famous apostrophe to the sea as the one force man cannot despoil, the "image of Eternity," ending with the poet's declaration that he has loved the ocean since boyhood and lays his hand upon its mane.
-
1818
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ozymandias
A traveller's report of a ruined desert statue whose pedestal proclaims the vast ambitions of a king whose works have wholly vanished.
-
1816
[lord-byron]
Darkness
Written in the sunless summer of 1816: the stars go out, men burn their cities for light and then their homes, the last two enemies die of each other's faces, and the universe is left darkness, without a wind.
-
1816
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Kubla Khan
A poet recalls a vision of the great Khan’s pleasure-dome in Xanadu, and laments the faded trance that would have let him rebuild it in song.
-
1816
[john-keats]
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Reading Chapman's Homer for the first time, described as an astronomer finding a new planet and as Cortez on a peak in Darien — the whole poem arriving at one silence, upon a peak.
-
1816
[lord-byron]
Prometheus
The Titan's crime was pity, his punishment silence — and Byron makes that silence the whole lesson: a firm will and a deep sense that can make even death a victory.
-
1816
[lord-byron]
When We Two Parted
A parting kept secret and a name now spoken freely by everyone else — so the grief has to stay private too, and the only greeting left, should they meet after long years, is silence and tears.
-
1815
[lord-byron]
She Walks in Beauty
Byron's celebrated lyric of feminine grace, finding in one woman's face the perfect union of dark and bright, inner virtue and outward loveliness.
-
1815
[lord-byron]
The Destruction of Sennacherib
In thundering anapests Byron retells the annihilation of the Assyrian host — gleaming one evening at sunset, silent and dead by dawn, melted by the Lord's glance.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803
Standing on Westminster Bridge at dawn, Wordsworth finds London more beautiful than any natural scene — the city lying open to sky and fields in smokeless morning calm.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
A solitary walk past a host of daffodils on a lake shore becomes, in memory, a source of joy that refreshes the poet on his couch in vacant or pensive mood.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Wordsworth's great ode on the fading of the visionary gleam — the sense, felt in childhood, of a celestial radiance on all things, and the poet's mature consolation in memory, sympathy, and "the soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
The Solitary Reaper
A Highland girl singing alone as she reaps, in a language the traveller cannot understand — which is why the song has no bottom, and why he carries it in his heart long after he has climbed the hill and heard it no more.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
The world is too much with us
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers — a sonnet that would sooner be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn than go on being unmoved by the sea that bares her bosom to the moon.
-
1804
[william-blake]
And did those feet in ancient time
Blake's visionary preface-poem to Milton — a defiant call to rebuild Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land through mental fight.
-
1802
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Dejection: An Ode
Wrestling with creative paralysis and emotional deadness, Coleridge addresses an unnamed Lady, lamenting that joy must come from within the soul before it can be found in nature.
-
1798
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Frost at Midnight
Alone with his sleeping infant at midnight, Coleridge meditates on frost, childhood memory, and the life of open wonder he wishes for his son.
-
1798
[william-wordsworth]
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
Revisiting the Wye valley after five years, Wordsworth traces how nature's forms have sustained him in absence and shaped his moral being, closing with a prayer for his sister Dorothy.
-
1798
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
A mariner shoots an albatross and is cursed to wander the earth, telling his tale of guilt, penance, and hard-won grace.
-
1794
[william-blake]
The Tyger
A series of unanswerable questions addressed to the tiger — what immortal daring could have created so fearful and beautiful a creature?
-
1789
[william-blake]
The Lamb
A child asks a lamb who made it, then answers the question himself — the same creator who became a little child and bore the name of lamb.
-
1751
[thomas-gray]
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church-Yard
Dusk in a country churchyard, and the long reckoning of lives that were never given the chance to be famous — mute inglorious Miltons, flowers born to blush unseen — closing on the poet's own epitaph.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book I: Minerva's Descent to Ithaca
Book I of Pope's Odyssey: Minerva's Descent to Ithaca.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book II: The Council of Ithaca
Book II of Pope's Odyssey: The Council of Ithaca.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book III: The Interview of Telemachus and Nestor
Book III of Pope's Odyssey: The Interview of Telemachus and Nestor.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book IV: The Conference with Menelaus
Book IV of Pope's Odyssey: The Conference with Menelaus.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book IX: The Adventures of the Cicons, Lotophagi and Cyclops
Book IX of Pope's Odyssey: The Adventures of the Cicons, Lotophagi and Cyclops.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book V: The Departure of Ulysses from Calypso
Book V of Pope's Odyssey: The Departure of Ulysses from Calypso.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book VI
Book VI of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book VII: The Court of Alcinous
Book VII of Pope's Odyssey: The Court of Alcinous.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book VIII
Book VIII of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book X: Adventures with Aeolus, the Laestrygons, and Circe
Book X of Pope's Odyssey: Adventures with Aeolus, the Laestrygons, and Circe.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XI: The Descent Into Hell
Book XI of Pope's Odyssey: The Descent Into Hell.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XII: The Sirene, Scylla, and Charybdis
Book XII of Pope's Odyssey: The Sirene, Scylla, and Charybdis.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XIII: The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca
Book XIII of Pope's Odyssey: The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XIV: The Conversation with Eumaeus
Book XIV of Pope's Odyssey: The Conversation with Eumaeus.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XIX: The Discovery of Ulysses to Euryclea
Book XIX of Pope's Odyssey: The Discovery of Ulysses to Euryclea.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XV: The Return of Telemachus
Book XV of Pope's Odyssey: The Return of Telemachus.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XVI: The Discovery of Ulysses to Telemachus
Book XVI of Pope's Odyssey: The Discovery of Ulysses to Telemachus.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XVII
Book XVII of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XVIII: The Fight of Ulysses and Irus
Book XVIII of Pope's Odyssey: The Fight of Ulysses and Irus.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XX
Book XX of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XXI: The Bending of Ulysses' Bow
Book XXI of Pope's Odyssey: The Bending of Ulysses' Bow.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XXII: The Death of the Suitors
Book XXII of Pope's Odyssey: The Death of the Suitors.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XXIII
Book XXIII of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1725
[homer]
The Odyssey, Book XXIV
Book XXIV of Pope's Odyssey.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book I
Book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book II
Book II of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book III
Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book IV
Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book IX
Book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book V
Book V of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book VI
Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book VII
Book VII of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book VIII
Book VIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book X
Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book XI
Book XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book XII
Book XII of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book XIII
Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book XIV
Book XIV of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1717
[ovid]
Metamorphoses, Book XV
Book XV of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Garth–Dryden verse translation.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book I: The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon
Book I of Pope's Iliad: The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book II: The Trial of the Army, and Catalogue of the Forces
Book II of Pope's Iliad: The Trial of the Army, and Catalogue of the Forces.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book III: The Duel of Menelaus and Paris
Book III of Pope's Iliad: The Duel of Menelaus and Paris.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book IV: The Breach of the Truce, and the First Battle
Book IV of Pope's Iliad: The Breach of the Truce, and the First Battle.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book IX: The Embassy to Achilles
Book IX of Pope's Iliad: The Embassy to Achilles.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book V: The Acts of Diomed
Book V of Pope's Iliad: The Acts of Diomed.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book VI: The Episodes of Glaucus and Diomed, and of Hector and Andromache
Book VI of Pope's Iliad: The Episodes of Glaucus and Diomed, and of Hector and Andromache.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book VII: The Single Combat of Hector and Ajax
Book VII of Pope's Iliad: The Single Combat of Hector and Ajax.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book VIII: The Second Battle, and the Distress of the Greeks
Book VIII of Pope's Iliad: The Second Battle, and the Distress of the Greeks.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book X: The Night Adventure of Diomed and Ulysses
Book X of Pope's Iliad: The Night Adventure of Diomed and Ulysses.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XI: The Third Battle, and the Acts of Agamemnon
Book XI of Pope's Iliad: The Third Battle, and the Acts of Agamemnon.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XII: The Battle at the Grecian Wall
Book XII of Pope's Iliad: The Battle at the Grecian Wall.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XIII: The Fourth Battle continued, in which Neptune assists the Greeks. The Acts of Idomeneus
Book XIII of Pope's Iliad: The Fourth Battle continued, in which Neptune assists the Greeks. The Acts of Idomeneus.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XIV: Juno deceives Jupiter by the Girdle of Venus
Book XIV of Pope's Iliad: Juno deceives Jupiter by the Girdle of Venus.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XIX: The Reconciliation of Achilles and Agamemnon
Book XIX of Pope's Iliad: The Reconciliation of Achilles and Agamemnon.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XV: The Fifth Battle, at the Ships; and the Acts of Ajax
Book XV of Pope's Iliad: The Fifth Battle, at the Ships; and the Acts of Ajax.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XVI: The Sixth Battle. The Acts and Death of Patroclus
Book XVI of Pope's Iliad: The Sixth Battle. The Acts and Death of Patroclus.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XVII: The Seventh Battle, for the Body of Patroclus. The Acts of Menelaus
Book XVII of Pope's Iliad: The Seventh Battle, for the Body of Patroclus. The Acts of Menelaus.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XVIII: The Grief of Achilles, and New Armour made him by Vulcan
Book XVIII of Pope's Iliad: The Grief of Achilles, and New Armour made him by Vulcan.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XX: The Battle of the Gods, and the Acts of Achilles
Book XX of Pope's Iliad: The Battle of the Gods, and the Acts of Achilles.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XXI: The Battle in the River Scamander
Book XXI of Pope's Iliad: The Battle in the River Scamander.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XXII: The Death of Hector
Book XXII of Pope's Iliad: The Death of Hector.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XXIII: Funeral Games in Honour of Patroclus
Book XXIII of Pope's Iliad: Funeral Games in Honour of Patroclus.
-
1715
[homer]
The Iliad, Book XXIV: The Redemption of the Body of Hector
Book XXIV of Pope's Iliad: The Redemption of the Body of Hector.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book I
Book I of Dryden's Aeneid — the Trojans, after a Seven Years Voyage, set sail for Italy, but are overtaken by a dreadful Storm, which Æolus raises at Juno's Request.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book II
Book II of Dryden's Aeneid — æneas relates how the City of Troy was taken, after a Ten Tears Siege, by the Treachery of Sinon, and the Stratagem of a Wooden Horse.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book III
Book III of Dryden's Aeneid — æneas proceeds in his Relation: He gives an Account of the Fleet with which he sail'd, and the Success of his first Voyage to Thrace; from thence be directs his Course to Delos, and asks the Oracle…
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book IV
Book IV of Dryden's Aeneid — dido discovers to her Sister her Passion for Æneas, and her thoughts of Marrying him.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book IX
Book IX of Dryden's Aeneid — takes Advantage of s Absence, fires some of his Ships, (which are transform'd into Sea-Nymphs) and assaults his Camp.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book V
Book V of Dryden's Aeneid — setting sail from is driven by a Storm on the Coasts of Where he is hospitably received by his Friend King of part of the Island, and born of Parentage.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book VI
Book VI of Dryden's Aeneid — the Sibyl foretels Æneas the Adventures be should meet with in Italy.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book VII
Book VII of Dryden's Aeneid — king Latinus entertains Æneas, and promises him his only Daughter, Lavinia, the Heiress of his Crown.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book VIII
Book VIII of Dryden's Aeneid — the War being now begun, both the Generals make all possible Preparations.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book X
Book X of Dryden's Aeneid, Virgil's epic of Aeneas and the founding of Rome.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book XI
Book XI of Dryden's Aeneid, Virgil's epic of Aeneas and the founding of Rome.
-
1697
[virgil]
The Aeneid, Book XII
Book XII of Dryden's Aeneid, Virgil's epic of Aeneas and the founding of Rome.
-
1681
[andrew-marvell]
The Definition of Love
A love begotten by Despair upon Impossibility, kept apart by jealous Fate like the two poles of the world — parallel lines, infinite, that can never meet: the conjunction of the mind, and opposition of the stars.
-
1681
[andrew-marvell]
The Garden
Green solitude preferred to every human prize: the gods chase mortal beauty only to end up holding a tree, fruit falls into the poet's hands unasked, and the mind withdraws to annihilate all that's made to a green thought in a green shade.
-
1681
[andrew-marvell]
To his Coy Mistress
Three moves: if there were world enough and time he would spend an age on each part of her; there is not, and time's winged chariot is audible behind them; therefore tear their pleasures through the iron gates of life.
-
1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XIX: When I consider how my light is spent
Blind before half his days are done, the poet asks whether God exacts day-labour of a man he has left in the dark — and patience answers before the question is finished: they also serve who only stand and waite.
-
1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XV: On the late Massacher in Piemont
Written on the slaughter of the Waldensians in 1655: Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints — mothers and infants rolled down the rocks, their moans redoubled from the vales to the hills to heaven, their blood sown to grow a hundredfold against the triple tyrant.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book I
Book I of Milton's Paradise Lost — satan and the fallen angels rouse on the burning lake and raise Pandemonium.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book II
Book II of Milton's Paradise Lost — the infernal council debates revenge; Satan alone sets out for the new world.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book III
Book III of Milton's Paradise Lost — god foresees the Fall, the Son offers himself, and Satan wings toward Eden.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book IV
Book IV of Milton's Paradise Lost — satan enters Paradise and first beholds Adam and Eve in their innocence.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book IX
Book IX of Milton's Paradise Lost — the temptation and the Fall — Eve, and then Adam, eat the forbidden fruit.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book V
Book V of Milton's Paradise Lost — raphael, sent to warn Adam, begins the tale of the angels' revolt.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book VI
Book VI of Milton's Paradise Lost — the three-day war in Heaven and the Son's victory over the rebel host.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book VII
Book VII of Milton's Paradise Lost — raphael recounts the six days' Creation of the world.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book VIII
Book VIII of Milton's Paradise Lost — adam relates his own creation and discourse with God; Raphael departs.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book X
Book X of Milton's Paradise Lost — judgment is passed; Sin and Death bridge Chaos; discord enters the world.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book XI
Book XI of Milton's Paradise Lost — michael foretells to Adam the future woes that follow from sin.
-
1667
[john-milton]
Paradise Lost, Book XII
Book XII of Milton's Paradise Lost — michael's prophecy of redemption through Christ; the expulsion from Paradise.
-
1648
[robert-herrick]
Delight in Disorder
An erring lace, a neglectful cuff, a careless shoe-string — the poem catalogues everything wrong with a woman's dress and finds each fault more bewitching than art that is too precise in every part.
-
1648
[robert-herrick]
To Daffodils
We weep to see the daffodils go so soon, and then discover we were weeping for ourselves — a spring as short as theirs, dried like the summer's rain or the pearls of morning dew, ne'er to be found again.
-
1648
[robert-herrick]
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may — the sun is always further along its race, the first age is always the best, and coyness costs more than it seems: having lost but once your prime, you may for ever tarry.
-
1648
[robert-herrick]
Upon Julia’s Clothes
Six lines that watch silk move: the liquefaction of her clothes, then the brave vibration each way free — and the poet, undone by the glitter.
-
1638
[john-milton]
Lycidas
A pastoral elegy for a college contemporary drowned in the Irish Sea, which breaks off mid-lament to arraign the corrupt clergy of the age — the two-handed engine at the door — before rising into consolation and turning away to fresh woods and pastures new.
-
1633
[john-donne]
A Valediction: forbidding mourning
Parting should be as quiet as the death of virtuous men — no tear-floods, no sigh-tempests — because a love refined beyond the senses only stretches, like gold to airy thinness, or like the two legs of a compass.
-
1633
[george-herbert]
Easter Wings
A pattern poem whose lines thin to Most poore and Most thinne and then widen again, so that each stanza is printed in the shape of a wing: the fall itself furthers the flight.
-
1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.
-
1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God
A prayer that asks God to stop knocking and start breaking: the speaker is a usurped town whose viceroy reason has proved untrue, and only being imprisoned can free him, only being ravished can make him chaste.
-
1633
[george-herbert]
Love (III)
Love keeps house and the guest keeps refusing — guilty of dust and sin, unworthy to look, fit only to serve — and every refusal is quietly answered, until: So I did sit and eat.
-
1633
[george-herbert]
The Collar
A tantrum in verse — the speaker strikes the board, swears he will abroad, and rages at his rope of sands in lines that break their own metre — until one word, calling Childe, ends it: And I reply’d, My Lord.
-
1633
[john-donne]
The Flea
A flea that has bitten them both becomes, by three turns of outrageous logic, their marriage bed and marriage temple — and when she kills it and nothing is lost, the argument simply changes sides and wins anyway.
-
1633
[george-herbert]
The Pulley
God pours every blessing on man but keeps back rest, so that weariness itself will do the work goodness might not — a restlessness engineered to toss him at last to God’s breast.
-
1633
[john-donne]
The Sunne Rising
The sun is scolded through the bedroom curtains as a busy old fool and a saucy pedantic wretch — until the poem swallows the world whole: she is all states, he all princes, and this bed is the centre the sun must warm.
-
1633
[john-donne]
The good-morrow
Everything before this love was a sucking on country pleasures, a sleep in the seven sleepers' den; waking, the lovers find each other's faces in each other's eyes and make one little room an everywhere that cannot die.
-
1633
[george-herbert]
Vertue
Day, rose and spring are each praised and then sentenced in the same breath — for thou must die — until only the seasoned timber of a virtuous soul is left standing when the whole world turns to coal.
-
1616
[ben-jonson]
Simplex Munditiis
Against the powdered, perfumed, endlessly adjusted face: where art hides its causes, nothing is sound — give him instead robes loosely flowing and hair as free, a sweet neglect that strikes the heart and not just the eye.
-
1616
[ben-jonson]
Song: To Celia
Drink to me only with thine eyes — a courtship conducted entirely in pledges and substitutions, ending with a rosy wreath sent back not withered but breathing, the poet insists, of her and not of itself.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Love defined by what it refuses to do: it does not alter when it finds alteration, does not bend to the remover, is the fixed star by which a wandering ship is steered — and the poet stakes his whole work on the claim being true.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 129: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Lust anatomised across all three tenses at once — hunted past reason, hated past reason the moment it is had, a bliss in proof and a very woe once proved — and the world knows this perfectly well, and shuns nothing.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 130: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
A systematic demolition of every Petrarchan compliment — the eyes, lips, breasts, hair, cheeks, breath and voice all fail the comparison, and the woman walks on the ground — which turns out to be the point: his love is as rare as any belied with false compare.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 146: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth
The body as a costly mansion on a short lease, gaudily painted while the soul inside starves; the remedy is to let the flesh pine and feed the soul on its loss, buying terms divine — and so feed on Death, that feeds on men.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Summer is too short, too rough, too soon overcast to be the compliment it seems — so the poem hands the beloved a better season, an eternal summer held open by the lines themselves, which outlast both weather and death for as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
Outcast, friendless and sick with envy of every better-favoured man, the speaker is lifted clear by one thought of the beloved — the lark rising from sullen earth — and ends refusing to trade places with kings.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
Memory convened like a court: the speaker summons up remembrance of things past, re-weeps friends long dead and pays old griefs over again as if they had never been settled — until one thought of a dear friend cancels the whole account.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 55: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Against war, masonry and all-oblivious enmity the poem sets nothing but itself, and wagers that the rhyme will carry the beloved further than any statue of a prince — alive in lovers’ eyes until the judgment day.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
Minutes press forward like waves on shingle; Time crowns what it has raised only to transfix it, delving parallels in beauty's brow and mowing everything down — and still the verse expects to stand, praising a worth that outlives the cruel hand.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
If sad mortality overwhelms brass and stone and the sea itself, what plea can beauty possibly hold? The sonnet finds one strong hand only — black ink, in which the miracle of a love may still shine bright.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Three images of ending — bare boughs where the birds sang, the twilight after sunset, a fire dying on the ashes of its own youth — arrive at the paradox that seeing the end makes the love stronger: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none
A cold, unsettling praise of those who can wound and don't — lords and owners of their faces, unmoved as stone — that turns on itself in the couplet: the summer's flower is sweet only until it festers, and lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
-
1599
[christopher-marlowe]
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my Love — an offer made entirely of beds of roses, caps of flowers, lambswool gowns and coral clasps, with no mention of winter, which is exactly what the Nymph's reply will notice.