The verse about the sipping birds is my favorite part of the poem. Unlike the generalized trope of singing birds in the poem’s first line, the birds in verse 4 are keenly observed in a way that was rare until the Romantics and naturalists of later centuries. The birds don’t keep thei...
Conflict between doubt and faith looms large in "The last Night that She lived" (1100), perhaps Emily Dickinson's most powerful death scene. The poem is written in second-person plural to emphasize the physical presence and the shared emotions of the witnesses at a death-bed. The past ...
For what it’s worth here is a little poem I wrote on my phone as I lay on my back in my sick bed in my little cubicle. Thinking about… I don’t know, just thinking, making stuff up. Every breath is a moment in time a breath of yours is a breath of mine Under the hill an...
If, on the other hand, you have a supportive social network, as I was lucky enough to have – I can’t imagine a more supportive workplace than ALDF –or if your relationship with your companion animal was especially profound and deep, you may get more out of reading books about the ...
Mind the gaps that may suck you in, or pay you well, because killing for a cause is killing still. Emily XYZ NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 19, The Burden of Truth My poem today was to be about something that “haunts” me. Fair enough. ...
It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a question to which her telltale cheeks had made instant reply. Evidently she would greatly mind; and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown eyes as corroborative testimony. ...
a large amount of recognition, not only for his poetry and fiction, but as an exceptional literary critic. He also achieved popular success, especially following the publication of his poem "The Raven." Edgar had fallen for Merrie next and she died of brain cancer. After a period in which...
He had the look of an angry bear about him. The young man is unmoved by the bear-man’s poem. He has come here with a terrible emptiness in his heart. It bleeds out of him now, and into Elizabeth. She feels no pain of her own, but when it is the precursor of the rapture of...
bankrolled the cause. His untimely death at thirty-six, in Missolonghi in April 1824, contributed renewed international interest in the struggle. Another key philhellenenist was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in the preface to his 1821 poem “Hellas,” captured the movement’s romanticism, or ...
The fact that these clubs were widely known to be a male-only space mattered because in Victorian art and literature, the home was envisioned as a feminine space, presided over by an "angel" as per Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem "The Angel in the House". John Ruskin enlarged on this visi...