Annabel Lee
A lyrical elegy of love and loss in a kingdom by the sea.
My Last Duchess
A Duke’s refined monologue reveals jealousy, control, and a chilling confession.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Dickinson personifies Death as a courteous suitor on a quiet carriage ride toward eternity.
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
A resilient bird in the soul sings on through every storm — Dickinson’s defining metaphor of hope.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 explores the depth and endurance of love that transcends both time and death.
The World Is Too Much With Us
A bracing sonnet against distraction and commerce — Wordsworth pleads for a restored capacity to see the world as sacred.
London, 1802
An urgent apostrophe to Milton — Wordsworth critiques national selfishness and calls for humble, star-like virtue.
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” transforms remembered nature into moral vision — attention ripened by time becomes wisdom.
Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud)
A portable sunrise: Wordsworth’s daffodils show how remembered delight restores the heart in solitude.
The Solitary Reaper
A singer in a field teaches Wordsworth an ethics of listening — mystery honored, music carried inward as lasting solace.
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.
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” captures the longing to escape mortality through the immortal voice of song.