By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
A. E. Housman (1859-1936) didn’t write a great deal of poetry. When he died, he had published just two slim volumes, A Shropshire Lad (published at his own expense in 1896) and the fittingly titled Last Poems (1922).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Church-Monuments’ is one of the greatest poems by the Welsh Metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593-1633). The poem is a memento mori – a reminder that we will die – but one with an altogether more stoic and positive outlook on death than many such poems. What follows is a brief summary analysis of Herbert’s ‘Church-Monuments’. What does this poem mean?
Church-Monuments
While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I intomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;
To which the blast of death’s incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Here’s a quiz question for you. How many poems can you name which have spawned the name of a whole poetic movement? A famous movement, too. One poem readily springs to mind: Stephen Spender’s ‘The Pylons’, whose title inspired the name of the ‘Pylon Poets’, 1930s British poets whose work deals with technological modernity. But ‘The Pylons’ is a mysterious poem: its legacy is more famous than the poem itself. What is the meaning of Spender’s poem? Read ‘The Pylons’ here to discover (or rediscover) it; what follows is our attempt to analyse this important poem that came to define an era in British verse.
‘The Pylons’ is written in quatrains, which loosely follow an abba rhyme scheme – but sometimes only very loosely. For instance, in the first stanza we find ‘cottages’ chiming faintly with ‘villages’ and ‘made’ with ‘roads’.
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.