By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘England in 1819’ is a sonnet by the second-generation English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It’s one of Shelley’s most angry and politically direct poems, although a number of the allusions Shelley makes to contemporary events require some analysis and interpretation to be fully understood now, more than two centuries on.
Before we offer an analysis of ‘England in 1819’, here’s the text of the poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is one of William Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. You can read ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ here before proceeding to the summary and analysis below.
Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of this long poem is to go through it, section by section. So we’ll offer a sort of combined summary and analysis as we go.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), wrote ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ in 1816 during the same holiday at Lake Geneva that produced the novel Frankenstein (written, of course, by Percy’s wife, Mary Shelley). Below, we offer a summary and analysis of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, stanza by stanza.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Perfect Woman’, sometimes known by its first line, ‘She was a phantom of delight’, is a poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote in 1804 about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. The poem is a classic example of uxorious poetry – poetry written about the love for a wife – and although its meaning is fairly straightforward, a few words of analysis will help to elucidate certain features of Wordsworth’s ‘Perfect Woman’. First, though, here’s the poem:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ in 1797. The poem has a curious origin in an incident involving spilt milk; there may be no use crying over spilt milk, but there is something to be said for writing great poetry about it. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, written in blank verse, is an example of this. Below, we go through the poem one stage at a time, offering a summary and analysis of it.