The Book of Jonah is one of the shorter, not to mention more hermeneutically challenging, books of the Old Testament: how should we analyse and interpret this strange tale of a prophet being swallowed by a whale? Was it even a whale? Could the whole Book of Jonah, in fact, […]
Tag: Summary
A Short Analysis of Cassius’ ‘The Fault, Dear Brutus’ Speech from Julius Caesar
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’; ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus’. In just over half a dozen lines, Cassius gives us two of the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. His ‘bestride the narrow world […]
A Summary and Analysis of Amanda Gorman’s ‘The Hill We Climb’
In January 2021, the 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman achieved a record: she became the youngest person ever to recite a poem at a US President’s inauguration, when Gorman read her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The poem is hopeful while being realistic about […]
A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can […]
A Summary and Analysis of the Myth of Daedalus and Icarus
The story of Icarus is one of the most famous tales from Greek myth. The tale is often interpreted as being fundamentally about the dangers of hubris, with Icarus’ flight a metaphor for man’s overreaching of his limits (and coming to a sticky end as a result). But does the […]