The Solitary Reaper
A singer in a field teaches Wordsworth an ethics of listening — mystery honored, music carried inward as lasting solace.
Theme
england
25 poems
england
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.
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.”
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.
Manfred (Selected Excerpts)
Byron’s alpine closet drama pits solitary will against fate — responsibility without consolation, spectacle without cure.