So, We’ll Go No More a Roving
A tender farewell to excess, Byron’s lyric accepts time’s limits so that love may last.
She Walks in Beauty
Byron’s classic lyric celebrates beauty as harmony — a poised balance of dark and bright, surface and soul.
When We Two Parted
A restrained lyric of secrecy and betrayal, “When We Two Parted” turns grief into judgment with tolling simplicity.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto III — Selected Excerpts)
Exile becomes self-fashioning in Byron’s Canto III, where Spenserian stanzas join spectacle to inward pilgrimage.
Paradise Lost (Selected Excerpts)
Milton’s epic of the Fall explores freedom and obedience in sweeping blank verse — theology unfolding as dramatic action.
Lycidas (Selected Excerpts)
Milton’s pastoral elegy blends classical rite and Christian prophecy, turning grief into renewed vocation.
On His Blindness (Sonnet XIX)
Milton’s Sonnet XIX reframes vocation through patience: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
L’Allegro (Selected Excerpts)
Milton’s ode to mirth celebrates festivity as a disciplined joy — pastoral song and theater shaping perception and virtue.
Il Penseroso (Selected Excerpts)
Milton’s companion ode to contemplation praises learned solitude, ritual, and vision as a humane counterbalance to mirth.