Tithonus
Granted immortality but not eternal youth, Tithonus ages forever beside the ever-young dawn goddess who loves him — and begs to be allowed to die. Tennyson’s dark twin to “Ulysses” argues that death is not life’s enemy but its mercy.
Theme
immortality
6 poems
immortality
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.
Death Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
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.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Death is polite, the ride is unhurried, and the speaker has been dead for centuries by the time she tells the story. Dickinson’s most famous poem is calmer than it has any right to be.
Adonais (Selected Excerpts)
Shelley’s elegy for Keats rises from lament to luminous consolation — art and memory outlasting rumor and death.
Emily Dickinson
The reclusive genius of Amherst who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in near-total privacy — and, decades after her death, became one of the founders of modern American poetry.