The Eve of St. Agnes (Selected Excerpts)
A winter romance in Spenserian stanzas, “The Eve of St. Agnes” stages desire at the threshold of ritual and risk.
Bright Star
Keats reimagines constancy as intimacy — a star’s steadiness translated into breath and touch.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A modern ballad of enthrallment and warning, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” leaves desire stranded where no birds sing.
To Autumn
“To Autumn” praises ripeness and labor, accepting time’s change with a serenity tuned to soft-dying light.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats’s urn contrasts life’s change with art’s permanence — desire held forever just before fulfillment.
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” captures the longing to escape mortality through the immortal voice of song.
Love’s Philosophy
Shelley’s playful persuasion argues that nature itself mingles and kisses — so should lovers, by a gentle law divine.
Adonais (Selected Excerpts)
Shelley’s elegy for Keats rises from lament to luminous consolation — art and memory outlasting rumor and death.
Mont Blanc (Selected Excerpts)
In “Mont Blanc,” Shelley tests the sublime as a pact between mind and mountain — perception making grandeur legible.
To a Skylark
Shelley’s skylark, pure song in flight, teaches a difficult joy — art that consoles without denying human lack.
Ode to the West Wind (Selected Excerpts)
Shelley’s ode harnesses a revolutionary wind — destroyer and preserver — to scatter verse like sparks toward renewal.
Ozymandias
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” unveils the ruins of empire and the irony of power’s impermanence beneath desert sands.