What Is Life?John Clare (1793-1864) AND what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,A mist retreating from the morning sun,A busy, bustling, still repeated dream.—Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought.And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought. What is vain Hope?—The puffing gale of morn,That robs each flow’ret of …
The WindhoverGerard Manley Hopkins To Christ Our Lord I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wingIn his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a …
The Best of SchoolD.H. Lawrence The blinds are drawn because of the sun,And the boys and the room in a colourless gloomOf underwater float: bright ripples runAcross the walls as the blinds are blownTo let the sunlight in; and I,As I sit on the shores of the class, alone,Watch the boys in their summer blousesAs …
A Postcard from the Volcano by Wallace Stevens Children picking up our bones . . .
A Postcard from the Volcano by Wallace Stevens Children picking up our bones . . .
During the first six weeks of the semester, each of my Introduction to Criticism students composed three “close readings” of three poems of their choice. Most poems (per my suggestion) were chosen from Poetry Foundation‘s online archive. Below is a complete list of the poets and poems students chose to analyze, along with links to texts of these poems. Next to the titles, …
My students and I nearly read the entirety of Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947) over the last four weeks. We skipped the chapters on Milton, Pope, and Tennyson, but that still left us quite a few: eight chapters out of eleven. No one envied us.
