In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti’s frozen Christmas poem is stranger and bleaker than Holst’s tune lets on. A close reading of the world that refuses to receive.
Era
victorian
7 poems
victorian
Loveliest of Trees
A twenty-year-old does the math on how many springs he has left and decides to spend them looking at a tree. The least dramatic carpe diem in English, and one of the most exact.
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died
Everyone in the room is braced for the sacred moment. What arrives is a fly. Dickinson’s most devastating poem is about what death looks like when the King doesn’t come.
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
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.
“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers
A bird that sings without words, costs nothing, and gets louder in a storm. Dickinson’s most quoted poem is a hymn to hope that works better than it probably should.
To an Athlete Dying Young
The same gesture carries two meanings: shouldered in victory, shouldered to the grave. Housman’s elegy makes a case for early death it doesn’t quite trust.
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.