By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ was written in April 1798, the year that William Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge signalled their arrival on the literary scene with their ground-breaking collection of Romantic poems, Lyrical Ballads.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Spring’ is not one of William Blake’s most famous poems. The poem was first published in Blake’s 1789 collection Songs of Innocence. It’s a glorious celebration of the arrival of spring, exploring the harmony of man with the natural world and some of Blake’s more popular themes: childhood, innocence, and nature being three of the most prominent.
Spring
Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute!
Bird’s delight,
Day and night,
Nightingale,
In the dale,
Lark in sky,—
Merrily,
Merrily merrily, to welcome in the year.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Being depressed from time to time is a fact of life. But should we deal with feeling down, a case of the blues, or – as John Keats calls it – ‘melancholy’? In his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (written in 1819), the poet offers some advice on how to deal with a dose of the doldrums. In this post, we’re going to offer an analysis of ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and the language Keats uses in this poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key figures of English Romanticism, and a handful of his poems are universally known thanks to their memorable phrases and opening lines. Blake frequently spoke out against injustice in his own lifetime: slavery, racism, poverty, and the corruption of those in power. In this post we’ve chosen what we consider to be ten of the best William Blake poems, along with links to each of them.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
William Blake (1757-1827) wrote many great poems which remain widely read and studied. But ‘London’ is, along with ‘The Tyger’, possibly the most famous of all his poems. ‘London’ was first published in 1794 in his volume Songs of Experience, which was written to offer the flipside to the positive, transcendent message present in Blake’s earlier volume Songs of Innocence.
Although the poem’s meaning is pretty clear and straightforward, it is our intention in this analysis to uncover some of the more curious aspects of its language.