The Good-Morrow
One of Donne’s greatest love poems. Waking beside his beloved, the speaker calls everything before this love a childish sleep, and argues that their joined love makes one little room a whole world that cannot die.
Theme
english
18 poems
english
Up-Hill
A weary traveler asks whether the road climbs all the way to the end, and an unseen voice answers. Rossetti’s dialogue turns life into an uphill journey and death into a welcoming inn with beds for all who come.
Song (When I Am Dead, My Dearest)
Written when Rossetti was a teenager, this gentle “Song” asks a lover to skip the roses and sad songs — and grants him the freedom to remember her or forget. A serene, quietly radical meditation on death.
Rupert Brooke
English poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) won fame for his idealistic 1914 war sonnets, above all “The Soldier,” and for his early death en route to Gallipoli. A look at his life, poems, style, and reputation.
Matthew Arnold
The Victorian poet and critic behind “Dover Beach”: a life spent bridging faith and doubt, Romantic feeling and classical restraint, poetry and the criticism that made him the “sage” of his age.
John Donne
Foremost of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne fused intellect, passion, and faith — from audacious love lyrics to the Holy Sonnets and the sermons that made him Dean of St Paul’s.
A. E. Housman
Classical scholar by day and lyric poet by vocation, Housman distilled youth, lost love, and mortality into the spare, unforgettable poems of A Shropshire Lad — beloved music made out of restraint and sorrow.
Thomas Hardy
Famous first as a novelist, Hardy gave his last thirty years to the poetry he loved most — “The Darkling Thrush,” the haunting elegies for his wife Emma — facing time, chance, and loss with unflinching, tender honesty.
Lord Byron
Poet, celebrity, exile, and creator of the Byronic hero: Byron lived as boldly as he wrote, from “She Walks in Beauty” to the satirical sweep of Don Juan, before dying at thirty-six in the cause of Greek freedom.
William Blake
Poet, painter, and prophet, Blake hand-printed his own illuminated books and saw imagination as the deepest truth — from “The Tyger” to Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Dismissed in his day, now hailed as a singular genius.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The most radical of the Romantics, dead at twenty-nine: Shelley fused lyrical beauty with political fire in “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Prometheus Unbound, certain that imagination could remake the world.
John Keats
Dead at twenty-five after barely five years of writing, the English Romantic poured beauty and mortality into the great odes of 1819 — and became one of the most beloved poets in the language.