By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
A poem about growing old, but written when Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) was a young man in his early twenties, ‘Ulysses’ has been analysed as a response to the death of Tennyson’s close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Lotos-Eaters’ is quite a long poem. Below, we offer some words of analysis. ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ was published in Tennyson’s 1832 collection, which appeared when he was still in his early twenties.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Growing old’s like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.’ So said the great novelist Anthony Powell, summing up the sense of injustice that accompanies the onset of old age. There’s even a word for a fear of growing old: gerascophobia. In one of his less famous poems, the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88) wondered what it means to grow old.
A summary of a Hardy poem by Dr Oliver Tearle
Thomas Hardy wrote hundreds of poems over a period spanning more than 50 years; he supposedly wrote his last poem as he lay on his death bed in 1928. Although some of his poems are anthology favourites and well-known, there are many less widely-known poems in his Collected Poems which are worth reading and, indeed, analysing. With that in mind, here is Thomas Hardy’s wonderful poem ‘The Ivy-Wife’, with a brief summary and analysis of it.
I longed to love a full-boughed beech
And be as high as he:
I stretched an arm within his reach,
And signalled unity.
But with his drip he forced a breach,
And tried to poison me.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. He was the original ‘airy-fairy’ poet.
The phrase ‘airy-fairy’ – now used as a derogatory term for something light and insubstantial – can be traced back to Tennyson’s use of it in one of his early poems, ‘Lilian’ (1830). The first line of ‘Lilian’ reads: ‘Airy, fairy Lilian…’