Era
46 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.
Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns rose from a failing Ayrshire farm to literary fame, rescued the nation’s songs, and gave the world Auld Lang Syne before dying at thirty-seven.
John Keats’s sonnet captures the thrill of a great book opening like a new world — written overnight at twenty. Full poem, summary, and analysis.
Keats’s longest poem opens “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” A reading of his 1818 romance: the shepherd Endymion’s quest for the moon goddess, its lush couplets, and its harsh critical reception.
Facing the dread of an early death, Keats fears dying before his pen empties his teeming brain, before he traces the sky’s visions, before he loves. A reading of his 1818 sonnet on mortality, ambition, and love.
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807), better known as “Daffodils” — full text plus summary, background, analysis of themes, form notes, notable lines, and a glossary of older terms.
Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” reshapes a Scots folk song into a vow that grows past all reason — love measured against drying seas, melting rocks, and the whole run of a life. In four short quatrains it moves from a single image (a rose newly sprung in June) to an oath against the end of the world, and closes not on grand impossibility but on a simple, human promise: to come again, though it were ten thousand mile.
It sounds like serene wisdom — all we see is a dream within a dream. But Poe’s poem dramatizes that thought failing: the calm statement becomes a desperate question, and the speaker ends on a shore, weeping, as the sand runs through his hands.
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.
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.
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.
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.