By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’: so begins W. H. Auden’s ‘Autumn Song’, which features below in this compilation of ten of the best autumn poems in all of English literature. The following classic autumnal poems (or, to our readers in the US, the best poems about Fall) all … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Death is a theme that looms large in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86), and perhaps no more so than in the celebrated poem of hers that begins ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’. This is not just a poem about death: it’s a poem about the event of death, the moment of dying. Below is the poem, and a brief analysis of its language and meaning.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Philip Larkin wrote several poems about religion, such as ‘Church Going’, and memorably described it as a ‘vast moth-eaten musical brocade’ in ‘Aubade’. Larkin had a sceptical attitude to religion, being an atheist and self-described ‘Anglican Agnostic’ – like Thomas Hardy, Larkin had a fondness for the language and literature of the Anglican Church.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Sonnet 3 in Shakespeare’s sonnet continues the Bard’s attempts to persuade the Fair Youth to marry and sire an heir. This time, Shakespeare uses the image of the Youth’s reflection in a mirror to make his point: ‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest …’
What follows is, as with so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, an argument, or analysis of the situation, set out in fourteen iambic pentameter lines. Below is our analysis of Sonnet 3, along with a summary of the poem’s argument.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. He thought Homer was a woman.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian novelist and thinker, wrote translations of both the Iliad (1898) and the Odyssey (1900), and in 1897 wrote a book about his theory, The Authoress of the Odyssey, which presented the ‘evidence’ for the case that Homer, far from being a blind man, or a team of writers, was actually female. Few were convinced, although Robert Graves notably took up the theory in the twentieth century, in his novel Homer’s Daughter.
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