Era
43 poems
Tennyson spent seventeen years mourning his friend Arthur Hallam, and the result is the greatest elegy in English. These selected cantos trace its journey — from the desolate empty house, through “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” to a faith made, as Eliot said, of doubt.
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.”
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.
Written in 1867 but unpublished for thirty years, Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” remembers the end of a love beside a frozen pond, where a white sun, gray leaves, and a dying smile fix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.
A Canadian army surgeon, John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields after a friend’s death at Ypres — the poem that made the poppy a symbol of remembrance. His life, his war, and his legacy.
He lost a leg to tuberculosis, wrote Invictus from his sickbed, and edited the magazines that launched Kipling and Yeats. The defiant life of William Ernest Henley — poet, editor, and the model for Long John Silver.
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.
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.