By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was a fine Victorian poet and critic who also wrote the classic poem ‘Dover Beach’. ‘The Forsaken Merman’ is a less famous poem than that, but it’s an interesting narrative poem about – you guessed it – a merman (or ‘male mermaid’) who is forsaken by his lover.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales are among the most powerful and evocative pieces of writing about spring in all of English literature, from the first reference to the rejuvenating qualities of April showers through to the zodiacal allusions to Aries (the Ram). Here it is, in the original Middle English: a time machine taking us back to a spring more than six centuries ago.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Now fades the last long streak of snow’: this canto, Canto CXV from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) – written in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam – offers a bittersweet take on the arrival of spring. What grows in the speaker’s breast as spring comes into blossom is regret – regret that his dear friend is gone, that spring is a reminder that the world continues to turn and life carries on, but Tennyson’s friend does not return. One of the best poems in a great long poetic sequence.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is not now principally known for his poetry (indeed, it might be said that he is still less famous for his writings than he is for … having been Oscar Wilde), and his one enduringly famous poem is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. However, early in his career he wrote more poetry than anything else, and ‘Easter Day’ is one of his finest verses – a nice sonnet about Rome on Easter Day.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Festus Claudius McKay (1889-1948), better known as Claude McKay, was a Jamaican-American writer and an important poet in the Harlem Renaissance which also included Langston Hughes. McKay was an atheist (‘a pagan’, as he himself puts it), but one who could enjoy the scent of the Easter lily though he cannot believe in the Easter story. This is what ‘The Easter Flower’ is about.