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.
Category
Poems
Explore a growing archive of the world’s greatest poems, from the classical to the modern age. Each poem is presented in its original text, paired with thoughtful analysis and historical context. Whether you’re rediscovering the familiar or reading a timeless voice for the first time, these works reveal how poetry captures what endures in language — feeling, memory, and the shape of thought.
156 poems
Poems
Explore a growing archive of the world’s greatest poems, from the classical to the modern age. Each poem is presented in its original text, paired with thoughtful analysis and historical context. Whether you’re rediscovering the familiar or reading a timeless voice for the first time, these works reveal how poetry captures what endures in language — feeling, memory, and the shape of thought.
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
Lured by the nightingale’s deathless song, Keats tries to flee the human world of sickness and death — by wine, then by “the viewless wings of Poesy” — until the longing to die into beauty refutes itself, and a single word, “forlorn,” tolls him back to his “sole self.”
Ode on a Grecian Urn
On a marble urn, a lover leans forever toward a kiss he can never complete and a song hangs forever unsung. Keats’s ode asks whether this frozen perfection is a blessing or a torment — and leaves its famous “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” to be weighed, not simply believed.
To Autumn
Everything about “To Autumn” says it should be sad — the end of the year, the coming of winter, written by a man who was dying. Instead Keats writes the least mournful of all autumn poems. He deliberately turns away from elegy (“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”), erases himself almost entirely from the poem, and renders even the approach of winter as fullness and song.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
It reads like the original femme-fatale story: a beautiful faery woman lures a knight, drains him, and leaves him to die where no birds sing. But Keats built the ballad to make that reading impossible to trust — every word about the lady comes from a dying, deluded knight, we never once hear her voice, and the ghosts who brand her “without mercy” are themselves ruined men. The real subject may be desire that idealizes a woman, consumes her, then blames her when the dream ends.
Bright Star
Keats’s “Bright Star” is usually read as choosing warm human love over cold cosmic eternity. But the sonnet is caught in a trap: a star is constant precisely because it is alone and detached, while human warmth is mortal and always in motion. Keats wants permanence without isolation — and the poem half-knows you can’t have both, which is why its last line splits open into “live ever — or else swoon to death.”
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.
Ozymandias
A shattered statue in an empty desert, and a tyrant’s boast — “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” — turned inside out by time. Shelley’s sonnet is the supreme poem of power’s impermanence, and quietly a poem about art outlasting empire.