‘To sleep, perchance to dream’ is a famous line in probably the most famous section of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play is chock-full of famous lines – as the old quip has it, it’s a great play but has too many quotations in it – but this particular moment in this long […]
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, a popular poem to be read or recited at weddings, ends with the couplet: If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle steps into the yellow wood of a famous American poem Robert Frost’s two best-known poems both involve a speaker stopping in, or by, a wood: one takes place at the end of the day, in winter (his ‘Stopping by […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the symbolism of that perennially popular flower, the rose Roses are sometimes known as the queen of flowers, and they are perhaps the richest in symbolism, whether in Christianity, classical myth, or modern (especially romantic) literature. But the […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the meaning of Auden’s famous statement ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ This statement, made by W. H. Auden in his 1939 poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, has provoked plenty of commentary since Auden’s poem was published. But […]