What will the new year bring – good things or bad? And are we glad to say goodbye to the year we’re leaving behind? This is what Christina Rossetti (1830-94) wonders in this little-known New Year poem, which also contains a touching religious sentiment: ‘Watch with me Jesus, in my […]
Tag: Post A Poem A Day
‘Piano’: A Poem by D. H. Lawrence
An exercise in nostalgia in long couplets, D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Piano’ sees the speaker recalling his childhood when he listened to his mother playing the piano, while sitting under it and holding his mother’s feet as she played. This memory opens up a ‘vista’ into the past which includes […]
‘On a Tired Housewife’: An Anonymous Poem
On going to do nothing for ever and ever: ‘On a Tired Housewife’ has become a popular comic poem, but its origins appear to have been in tragedy: the unknown charwoman who wrote it in 1905 effectively penned it as her suicide note, citing extreme fatigue as her reason for […]
‘Anecdote for Fathers’: A Poem by William Wordsworth
‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is not one of William Wordsworth’s best-known poems. First published in the landmark 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth co-authored with Coleridge, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is narrated by a father who recalls going for a walk with his young son, and coming to realise that the boy’s […]
A Short Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s ‘Written near a Port on a Dark Evening’
‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is a sonnet by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the second half of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Smith’s sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly because nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on […]