By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Pearl is one of the jewels in the crown of medieval English poetry: a real gem of a poem. Part-elegy, part dream-vision (a popular kind of poem in medieval literature: see Piers Plowman for another prominent example), and part Christian allegory, the poem is by an unknown author who may or may not have been (but probably was) the same writer who gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In our pick of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best poems, we included ‘God’s Grandeur’, a sonnet celebrating ‘the grandeur of God’. Hopkins was one of the greatest religious poets of the entire nineteenth century, and this poem shows how he attained that reputation. Below is the poem, along with an analysis of some of its themes and linguistic features.
On a great poem by one of WWI’s overlooked war poets – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle
Ivor Gurney is a relatively little-known poet of the First World War. Born in Gloucester in 1890, he served in the War from 1915 until 1917; he would spend most of his final years in the City of London Mental Hospital, dying in 1937. ‘To God’ was written after Gurney’s experiences in the First World War, and during his confinement, as the ‘four walls’ suggest in the poem’s second line. Here is ‘To God’, followed by a short analysis of its language and meaning.
To God
Why have you made life so intolerable
And set me between four walls, where I am able
Not to escape meals without prayer, for that is possible
Only by annoying an attendant. And tonight a sensual
Hell has been put on me, so that all has deserted me
And I am merely crying and trembling in heart
For death, and cannot get it. And gone out is part
Of sanity. And there is dreadful hell within me.
By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Jabberwocky’ is perhaps the most famous nonsense poem in all of English literature. Although the poem was first published in Lewis Carroll‘s novel Through the Looking Glass in 1871, the first stanza was actually written and printed by Carroll in 1855 in the little periodical Mischmasch, which Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) compiled to entertain his family. Below is ‘Jabberwocky’ (sometimes erroneously called ‘The Jabberwocky’), followed by a brief analysis of its meaning. ‘Nonsense’ literature it may be, but let’s see if we can make some sense of the glorious nonsense.
Ben Jonson’s touching elegy on his son, ‘child of his right hand’ – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘On My First Sonne’, Ben Jonson’s short poem for his son Benjamin, who died aged seven, is one of the most moving short elegies in the English language. Some analysis of this touching tribute to the poet’s young son may help to show why the poem means so much to modern readers. Jonson (1572-1637) was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and, like the Bard, wrote poems as well as the plays for which he is well-known. Here is his poem ‘On my First Son’, along with a short analysis of it.
On My First Sonne
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy,
Seven yeeres thou’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the fate he should envÃe?
To have so soon scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage,
And, if no other miserie, yet age?