By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Infant Sorrow’ is the counterpart to ‘Infant Joy’: whereas ‘Infant Joy’ appeared in William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence, ‘Infant Sorrow’ was published in his 1794 volume Songs of Experience. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘Infant Sorrow’. […]
The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet […]
‘I travelled among unknown men’ is one of the ‘Lucy’ poems written by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Written in the quatrain form roughly resembling the ballad metre, linking these poems to the vernacular tradition of Border Ballads, ‘I travelled among unknown men’ is one of Wordsworth’s most accessible famous poems. Yet […]