By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Jerusalem’ is one of the most famous hymns around, a sort of alternative national anthem for England. Yet the poem on which Hubert Parry based his hymn, although commonly referred to as ‘William Blake’s “Jerusalem”’, is actually from a much larger poetic work titled Milton a Poem and was largely ignored when it was published in 1804.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the leading English Romantic poets, whose Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 collection Coleridge co-authored with Wordsworth, became a founding-text for English Romanticism. In this post, we’ve picked six of Coleridge’s best poems, and endeavoured to explain why these might be viewed as his finest poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the greatest second-generation Romantic poets, along with John Keats and Lord Byron. Shelley’s poem ‘To the Moon’ is a short lyric in which the poet, addressing the moon in the night sky, poses several questions to it. ‘To the Moon’ is worth analysing because it displays many hallmarks of Romantic poetry, not least the observation of and identification with the world around us (or, in the case of the moon, the world beyond our world), and pathetic fallacy, or the attributing of human emotions to non-human objects. Here is ‘To the Moon’.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Tyger’ is arguably the most famous poem written by William Blake (1757-1827); it’s difficult to say which is more well-known, ‘The Tyger’ or the poem commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’. The poem’s opening line, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ is among the most famous opening lines in English poetry (it’s sometimes modernised as ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright’).
Below is a summary of this iconic poem, along with a close analysis of the poem’s language, imagery, and meaning.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
John Keats wrote a number of sonnets in his short life, and ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ remains a popular and widely anthologised one. Some words of analysis are useful in highlighting the relevance of Keats’s imagery in this poem, as well as the form and language of the sonnet. The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg, which is particularly appropriate here, since in this poem Keats is preoccupied with dying prematurely, before he has had a chance to write his best work and take his place ‘among the English poets’ (as Keats himself put it).
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.