greykit.poetry — #1840s
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.