Theme
12 poems
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.
Killed a week before the Armistice at 25, Wilfred Owen left behind the most powerful poetry of the First World War — a look at his short life, his war, and the pity at the heart of his verse.
Poe’s most hypnotic elegy: a night-walk with Psyche where memory conceals and reveals the grave it seeks.
The nerves sit, the heart questions, the feet go round. Nobody’s home. Dickinson’s anatomy of shock is the most precise poem about aftermath in English.
Everyone quotes “rage, rage” as pure defiance. But this is a son begging his dying father not to surrender, and the villanelle’s helpless circling enacts the very death it rages against.
The raven only ever says one word. The horror of Poe’s masterpiece is that the grieving narrator knows this — and keeps asking the questions guaranteed to make “Nevermore” hurt most.
It sounds like “remember me forever.” But Rossetti’s sonnet talks itself out of the demand, ending by preferring that you forget and smile than remember and be sad.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” gets quoted as pure uplift. The poem around it is the speech of an old king walking out on his kingdom, his wife, and his son — and Tennyson never tells you whether to cheer.
Lord Byron’s lyric of a secret love affair that ended in silence — and the grief that returns at the sound of a name. Full poem, summary, and analysis.
It’s the poem everyone knows by Whitman and the one he came to resent: a rhymed, sentimental elegy for the assassinated Lincoln from the man who invented American free verse. Here’s why it works, and what it cost him.
Frost’s “Reluctance” weighs the dignity of refusal against nature’s insistence on change, ending with a stark challenge to easy acceptance.
The defining poet of the Victorian age and its Poet Laureate for over forty years, Tennyson turned private grief and public occasion alike into some of the most musical, most quoted verse in English.