Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats’s urn contrasts life’s change with art’s permanence — desire held forever just before fulfillment.
To Autumn
“To Autumn” praises ripeness and labor, accepting time’s change with a serenity tuned to soft-dying light.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A modern ballad of enthrallment and warning, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” leaves desire stranded where no birds sing.
Bright Star
Keats reimagines constancy as intimacy — a star’s steadiness translated into breath and touch.
To a Skylark
Shelley’s skylark, pure song in flight, teaches a difficult joy — art that consoles without denying human lack.
Mont Blanc (Selected Excerpts)
In “Mont Blanc,” Shelley tests the sublime as a pact between mind and mountain — perception making grandeur legible.
Adonais (Selected Excerpts)
Shelley’s elegy for Keats rises from lament to luminous consolation — art and memory outlasting rumor and death.
Love’s Philosophy
Shelley’s playful persuasion argues that nature itself mingles and kisses — so should lovers, by a gentle law divine.
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.
Manfred (Selected Excerpts)
Byron’s alpine closet drama pits solitary will against fate — responsibility without consolation, spectacle without cure.
The Prisoner of Chillon (Selected Excerpts)
A lyric tale of endurance, “The Prisoner of Chillon” finds inner liberty shadowed by grief — the world as a wider cell.