Theme
18 poems
The gentle companion to “The Tyger.” Where that poem asks who made the beast and never answers, “The Lamb” asks the same question — who made thee? — and answers it at once, with childlike certainty: God, who became a lamb and a little child. This is what innocence sounds like.
Tennyson spent seventeen years mourning his friend Arthur Hallam, and the result is the greatest elegy in English. These selected cantos trace its journey — from the desolate empty house, through “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” to a faith made, as Eliot said, of doubt.
Tennyson’s chosen last word — the poem he asked be placed last in every edition of his work. Death becomes a ship crossing the harbour bar into the open sea, faced not with rage but with calm, hard-won hope.
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.
The poet of renunciation wrote one great burst of joy. “A Birthday” overflows with similes, then demands a jewelled throne — and its imagery is so sacred that the love who “is come” may be earthly, divine, or both.
John Donne addresses death as a powerless braggart and argues that, for the faithful, it is only a short sleep before eternal waking. A reading of Holy Sonnet 10’s argument, form, and famous closing paradox.
Christina Rossetti’s frozen Christmas poem is stranger and bleaker than Holst’s tune lets on. A close reading of the world that refuses to receive.
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 bird that sings without words, costs nothing, and gets louder in a storm. Dickinson’s most quoted poem is a hymn to hope that works better than it probably should.
Blake’s most famous poem never describes the tiger — it interrogates its maker, asking who could forge such “fearful symmetry,” and in the end who would dare. A poem made entirely of unanswered questions about the God who made both the Lamb and the Tyger.
It isn’t a poem, and it isn’t really about friendship. Donne wrote “No man is an island” as prose while gravely ill, and its subject is death — the funeral bell you hear for a stranger tolls for you too.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), a Jesuit priest and Victorian poet, wrote experimental, devotional nature poems that went unpublished in his lifetime and reshaped modern English verse after their 1918 release.