Sonnet 18
Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” immortalizes beauty through verse, transforming fleeting love into eternal art — “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Sonnet 130
Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” celebrates real love through wit and honesty, rejecting the false comparisons of idealized beauty.
The Phoenix and the Turtle
Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle mourns the mystical union of two lovers — a profound elegy on love, truth, and spiritual unity.
Venus and Adonis
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis retells the myth of the goddess’s doomed love for a mortal — a masterpiece of desire, beauty, and loss.
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” reveals London’s dawn stillness — a rare moment of unity between nature, light, and human creation.
Michael
Wordsworth’s “Michael” tells the tragic story of a shepherd’s faith, family, and loss — a pastoral masterpiece on labor, love, and moral endurance.
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
Dickinson’s winter light presses like cathedral music — a moment where the divine feels near yet withholding, casting revelation as burden.
I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died
Dickinson’s stark vision of death and consciousness — a study in silence, interruption, and the limits of vision.
I Dwell in Possibility
Dickinson’s ars poetica: poetry as a house of infinite rooms, open to visitors and crowned by the gambrels of the sky.
The Bells
A sound-symphony of life turning to alarm and elegy—an analysis of Poe’s metrics, refrain, and the psychology of noise.
Ulalume
Poe’s most hypnotic elegy: a night-walk with Psyche where memory conceals and reveals the grave it seeks.
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
A clinical, lyrical x-ray of the mind after shock—analysis of Dickinson’s metaphors of ceremony, mineralization, and time.