maximus The gentle companion to “The Tyger.” Where that poem asks who made the beast and never answers, “The Lamb” asks the same question — who made thee? — and answers it at once, with childlike certainty: God, who became a lamb and a little child. This is what innocence sounds like.
Pope took a real scandal — a young lord who snipped a lock of a lady’s hair — and dressed it in the full armour of epic. The result is the wittiest satire in English, mocking vanity and epic alike while plainly delighting in the glittering world it sends up.
Tennyson spent seventeen years mourning his friend Arthur Hallam, and the result is the greatest elegy in English. These selected cantos trace its journey — from the desolate empty house, through “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” to a faith made, as Eliot said, of doubt.
One of the most musical lyrics in English — and it doesn’t rhyme. Tennyson names a grief with no cause, the objectless ache that wells up at the thought of “the days that are no more,” building through four deepening images to “O Death in Life.”
Granted immortality but not eternal youth, Tithonus ages forever beside the ever-young dawn goddess who loves him — and begs to be allowed to die. Tennyson’s dark twin to “Ulysses” argues that death is not life’s enemy but its mercy.
Written in 1867 but unpublished for thirty years, Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” remembers the end of a love beside a frozen pond, where a white sun, gray leaves, and a dying smile fix disillusionment forever.
Just six lines, built like a coiled spring. Tennyson sets his eagle atop the world in monumental stillness — the sea far below merely “crawls” — then releases everything in one final plunge, on a verb that may mean a strike, or a death.
The son of formerly enslaved parents, Paul Laurence Dunbar became the first African American poet to win national and international fame, writing “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy” before his death at thirty-three.
A country vicar and the most original of Ben Jonson’s followers, Robert Herrick packed his one book, Hesperides, with carpe diem lyrics like “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” before fading from view for a century.
Poet, satirist, and MP for Hull, Andrew Marvell wrote some of English poetry’s wittiest lyrics — including “To His Coy Mistress” — yet his verse stayed in shadow for two centuries before its rediscovery.
Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns rose from a failing Ayrshire farm to literary fame, rescued the nation’s songs, and gave the world Auld Lang Syne before dying at thirty-seven.
A Canadian army surgeon, John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields after a friend’s death at Ypres — the poem that made the poppy a symbol of remembrance. His life, his war, and his legacy.