Just as the dying breath of a good man is silent and imperceptible, so should no violent sorrow show the world how much they loved; thus wishes John Donne in his poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, one of the finest of his metaphysical poetries of love. The mysterious indefinable love for his... Sign in to see full entry.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy... Sign in to see full entry.
Dreams are a wonderfully compensatory mechanism given us by God, one that sustains us through the thick and thins of life. They make come back to life all that ever was dear to us - lost or dead. This is brought out so beautifully and tellingly in Donne’s The Dream, in a style typical of the... Sign in to see full entry.
The Host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailly, is one of the most lifelike characters in the Canterbury Tales. He has several features in common with another pilgrim - the Monk. Both are genial, expansive, pleasure-loving men of the world and are well-built with big bright eyes. Chaucer describes the... Sign in to see full entry.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, a 1948 Nobel Laureate, well known for his ground-breaking 20th century poetry of dense and allusion-heavy poems, especially so The Waste Land, is also the most widely talked about poets of literary history. For Eliot, the wasteland symbolizes that area of human life where men... Sign in to see full entry.
Tara is the name of a large cotton plantation in rural Georgia, owned by an Irish immigrant who has three young daughters. The eldest, Scarlett O'Hara is the most beautiful and is sought after by every young man in the country. But Scarlett's secret affections go for the refined and aristocratic... Sign in to see full entry.
Just imagine! Would existence be possible without the opposites? If there is life, there is death; if there are happiness galore, there are endless sorrows. If there are the scorching heat, parched lands and brown desolate deserts, there are the cool rains and seas and verdant greens aplenty too.... Sign in to see full entry.
The lyric proper is the product of a swift, momentary and passionate impulse. What the lyric poet has observed and experienced does generate in his mind trains of thought and waves of feeling producing an inner tension which finds release in lyrical outpourings. It is a cry from the heart - of joy,... Sign in to see full entry.
Shelley's To a Skylark has been regarded as the most wonderful of English lyrics. Its passionate effusions, its swift change of mood, its rapid succession of imagery, its rich melody, its lofty flights, and its idealistic yearnings cannot be analyzed. As the skylark singing melodiously rises higher... Sign in to see full entry.
In the days of the old, it so happened that men on earth started paying homage less and less to the temple of Aphrodite; it went increasingly unprayed and its altar uncleaned from neglect. Many a times not even the incense sticks were burned. Venus, the goddess of beauty to the Greeks, as Aphrodite,... Sign in to see full entry.