What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” reflects on memory, loss, and the quiet ache of vanished love.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 explores the depth and endurance of love that transcends both time and death.
The World Is Too Much With Us
A bracing sonnet against distraction and commerce — Wordsworth pleads for a restored capacity to see the world as sacred.
Ozymandias
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” unveils the ruins of empire and the irony of power’s impermanence beneath desert sands.
On His Blindness (Sonnet XIX)
Milton’s Sonnet XIX reframes vocation through patience: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Design
Frost’s sonnet “Design” frames beauty and predation to ask whether darkness, not benevolence, orders nature’s smallest scenes.