Holy Sonnets

William Blake’s five-stanza poem “The fly” tries to see humanity in a fly. It narrates the poet’s act of thoughtlessness in brushing away a fly which leads to the contemplation of the act and its implications, which further reveals the essence of life as “thought is life” and the lack of it, death. As the stanzas proceed from observation，contemplation, and conclusion to revelation and liberation, I get an understanding of Blake’s philosophical system. In my essay, I will argue that Blake uses a…

Tichborne's Elegy – Literature analisys Tichborne's Elegy was supposedly written by himself before his execution, due to his involvement in the consipracy to assissinate Elizabeth I (P. Burns, J. Edge, 43) . In his poem he is using metaphors upon metaphors, together with antithesis to construct a poem that shows his frustration and regret. He uses a plain and simple language. In fact, the whole poem is based entirely on one syllable words. However, his use of one syllable words only add to the…

Both Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti present the attractiveness of wrongdoing and fear of its consequences in both similar and different ways within An Ideal Husband and Rossetti’s Selected Poems. Rossetti and Wilde consider the attractiveness of wrongdoing under different themes. Wilde looks more at a political side of wrongdoing, whereas Rossetti considers wrongdoing in a religious sense. Mrs. Cheveley is a character that is very attracted to wrongdoing; this is evident in An Ideal…

According to Furniss & Bath, ‘literacy criticism in the Twentieth Century has come to regard ambiguity in poetry as one of its most characteristic and valuable features’, as shown in Michael Drayton’s sonnet ‘The Parting’, Lord Byron’s poem ‘When we two parted’ and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s poem ‘Love’s Last Lesson’ (Furniss & Bath, 1996: 207). The symbolism used in these poems portray the ambiguous representation of love/death elegies, love symbolizing hope and death symbolizing loss.…

In the poem, “Fish Fossil,” by Ai Qing, the speaker dramatizes the meaning of life, to live life to the fullest and do not let anything get in your way. In the title, the speaker uses the word “fossil” to symbolize past memories of his life. The entire poem is an allegory where every line portrays a deeper meaning to it rather than the words the speaker uses. The speaker begins the poem by referring to how energetic and successful he felt, “With such agility in your movements”(1). Also, as he…

In “Queries of Unrest” written by Clint Smith, the author thoroughly conveys his message of darkness, death, fear, and power by his strong use of repetition, symbolism, and imagery. Throughout “Queries of Unrest”, Smith uses many literary terms like repetition to get his message of the poem out. For example, he uses “Maybe”, “darkness”, “scared”, and “cry for help” many times in his poem. When he uses these words and phrases he uses them to express doubt and fear about his life and what he’s…

“[R]omanticism means, to most students a unitary shadowy phenomenon which can be extrapolated as forming a middle ground bounded by six poets: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelly” (Aers et al. 1). This paper deals with a work by the firstly named author: Blake. It is about the poem “The Chimney Sweeper: A little white thing among the snow” from 1794 from his collection of works named Songs of Experience. The poem is a companion poem to the formerly written “The Chimney Sweeper:…

In the villanelle structured poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” written by Dylan Thomas is a transparent, yet raw expression of animosity and utter brawl towards annihilation of one’s life. Dylan Thomas embodied complex analogies, naturalistic imagery, and repetition to correspond to the elemental, impassioned theme of bereavement and fatality. While the poem advises one to be unyielding and relentless as death approaches until the last second, the author implies that death is…

In the Romantics Era there were many important qualities of Romanticism and one of those ideas was a story or explanation inside human awareness. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth believed that poetry is a way of grasping the insight of life. The Romantic writers, Coleridge and Wordsworth, both portray nature but in opposite ways than one another. Coleridge is the type of writer that underlines the grievous, supernatural and magnificent part of nature, while Wordsworth is the…

Themes of nature in the works of T S Eliot T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an imperative breakthrough in the history of English poetry and one of the most deliberated poems of the twentieth century. It is a long poem of about four hundred forty lines in the five parts entitled 1) The Burial of the dead, 2) A Game of Chess, 3) The Fire Sermon, 4) Death by Water and 5) What the Thunder said. The poet was just recovering after a serious breakdown in health, caused by domestic worries and over-work…