Poem of the Week

Check here or in your inbox every Wednesday for the Poem of the Week, usually a short poem, often one you might get by heart in a couple of minutes, with a brief discussion of the poet’s art as we find it in sound and sense, image and symbol, dramatic moment, dramatic irony, surprise and resolution. Learn to be at home in the art that is common to all mankind!

Language is ..boundlessly inventive, fanciful, jesting, sometimes as sharp as a shaft of light, sometimes meditative, like an Indian-summer with the…
10
From John Milton, Paradise Lost | How to describe the feeling of someone wholly innocent and blessed? You can’t describe it. Maybe you can catch a…
6
The quality of mercy is not strained;/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that…
3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is all about fantastic visions that move the artist’s mind and soul to creative action. But the thing about visions is…
11
John Donne. We do not always know what we love. Sometimes it strikes us as quite a revelation. Maybe some of my readers will say, “Yes, I didn’t know…
1
The scene is a small cottage, in a crisp winter night, and the poet Coleridge is awake beside the low fire, and his sleeping infant son. He looks to…
4
Imagine that you are a passionate young man of high ideals, the young John Keats, reading all the fine poetry he can find — Chaucer, Spenser…
4
One of the marks of great art is that you can never come to an end of appreciating it. And perhaps the greatest works of art are those that themselves…
21
Tennyson, from "In Memoriam," 1850
5
T. S. Eliot, 1927
11
John Betjeman
2
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888
2
G. K. Chesterton (1899)
Robert Frost (1928)
2
George Herbert
2
William Butler Yeats, 1891
4
John McCrae, 1915
4
Richard Wilbur
5
George Herbert, 1639
2
Back when there weren’t any helpful drugs to clear away the obsessions of a troubled mind, a mountain of a man named Samuel Johnson kept them at bay…
2
Language is ..boundlessly inventive, fanciful, jesting, sometimes as sharp as a shaft of light, sometimes meditative, like an Indian-summer with the…
10
From John Milton, Paradise Lost | How to describe the feeling of someone wholly innocent and blessed? You can’t describe it. Maybe you can catch a…
6
The quality of mercy is not strained;/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that…
3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is all about fantastic visions that move the artist’s mind and soul to creative action. But the thing about visions is…
11
John Donne. We do not always know what we love. Sometimes it strikes us as quite a revelation. Maybe some of my readers will say, “Yes, I didn’t know…
1
The scene is a small cottage, in a crisp winter night, and the poet Coleridge is awake beside the low fire, and his sleeping infant son. He looks to…
4
See all