Form
56 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.
One of the most musical lyrics in English — and it doesn’t rhyme. Tennyson names a grief with no cause, the objectless ache that wells up at the thought of “the days that are no more,” building through four deepening images to “O Death in Life.”
Written in 1867 but unpublished for thirty years, Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” remembers the end of a love beside a frozen pond, where a white sun, gray leaves, and a dying smile fix disillusionment forever.
Just six lines, built like a coiled spring. Tennyson sets his eagle atop the world in monumental stillness — the sea far below merely “crawls” — then releases everything in one final plunge, on a verb that may mean a strike, or a death.
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.
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.
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 poem that gave Maya Angelou her memoir title. Dunbar’s caged bird — beating its wings, singing not for joy but as a prayer for freedom — became one of American poetry’s great images of oppression and longing.
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.
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.
Twelve short lines of open desire. Dickinson casts longing as a storm to revel in and a harbor to reach, ending on a single wish: to moor, tonight, in thee.
Tell the whole truth, but tell it slant. Dickinson’s compact defense of indirection argues that truth too bright to bear must be eased in gradually or it blinds.