By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.’ Or, to be precise and observe the line break: ‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.’ This is one of several famous quotations which originated in the 1854 poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ written by the UK Poet Laureate of the time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 tragedy offers an especially high density of well-known quotations per page.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 Woods on a Snowy Evening’), while the other, his most famous poem, takes place one morning during autumn. That poem is ‘The Road Not Taken’, which mentions a ‘yellow wood’ within its opening line. But what does that yellow wood symbolise?
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 symbolism of roses is a curious topic, because red and white roses have attracted such starkly different connotations.