Interesting Literature

‘My Last Duchess’: A Poem by Robert Browning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Probably Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ is spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, chatting away to an acquaintance (for whom we, the reader, are the stand-in) and revealing a sinister back-story lurking behind the portrait of his late wife, the Duchess, that adorns the wall.

My Last Duchess

FERRARA

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

A Short Analysis of Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

This poem by the Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) is about a rabid dog that bites a man, and the effect that this act of violence has on the people of London.

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.

In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say
That still a godly race he ran,
Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;

‘Epitaph’: A Poem by Katherine Philips

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One of the most interesting female poets of the seventeenth century, Katherine Philips (1632-64) wrote this short poem as an elegy for her son, ‘H. P.’, who died just six weeks after he was born. The joyous exultation with which the birth had been greeted – ‘A son, a son is born at last’ – turns to tragedy with the boy’s death, in this heart-wrenching and accessible elegy by an underrated seventeenth-century female poet.

Epitaph

On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred

What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.

‘A Dirge’: A Poem by Christina Rossetti

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

This poem, ‘A Dirge’, is not one of Christina Rossetti’s absolute classics, but a phrase from it has had a new lease of life in the last few years: J. K. Rowling borrowed ‘the cuckoo’s calling’ from the poem and used it as the title for one of her novels. As its title suggests, ‘A Dirge’ is a poem of mourning about a loved one who has died.

A Dirge

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.

‘A Long, Long Sleep’: A Poem by Emily Dickinson

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

This short poem by one of American literature’s greatest poets is actually about death – but then death is probably Emily Dickinson’s greatest theme. The ‘long, long sleep’ is the sleep of death: death is imagined as an unbroken slumber for centuries, where the sleeper doesn’t ‘once look up for noon’.

A long — long Sleep — A famous — Sleep —
That makes no show for Morn —
By Stretch of Limb — or stir of Lid —
An independent One —

Was ever idleness like This?
Upon a Bank of Stone