Category: Poetry

Richard Wilbur’s poem “Boy at the Window” describes a young boy looking at the snowman he has built outside his window at twilight. Noting the cold outdoor environment in which his snowman must spend the night, the boy weeps; however, the poem reveals that the snowman’s own reaction to his environment is quite different. As…

Parents are innately protective of their children. They know that their children will meet struggles in their lives, but at one point the parent must let their child be and simply wish him or “her a lucky passage.” In “The Writer” by Richard , the speaker is describing his daughter’s experience in writing, which is…

It is a common notion for people to believe other people tend to have better lives than their own. Regardless of the situation, people will compare the worst part of their own life to the best parts of other peoples’ lives, creating a wider disparity than what exists. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” narrates a…

Topic Analysis “To listen is to simultaneously attend to what is present and what is absent”. In “Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding,” Jed Rasula analyses the impact of the spoken word on the understanding of poetry. Historically, poetry, and most literary forms, started as an oral tradition. They were sung by barbs in various…

Poetry, as a genre of literature, is broadly defined as “The art or work of a poet”, or “Imaginative or creative literature in general” (Oxford English Dictionary). With a definition so broad in context, poets are able to conceive their own literature as poetry by studying poems and poets before them. Subsequently, poets are able…

Though they come from the shores of different eras and the minds of different authors, the protagonists of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are all knights in their own way. One can go even further: they are, basically,…

Women and Roses by Robert Browning explores the idea of dreams concerning love, in particular sexual love. The speaker imagines the three women of time as roses: the past, present, and future. Though this poem appeared within the repressive Victorian era, through the allusions and dream visions Browning manages to explicitly develop the sexual fantasies…

In Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, “Porphyria’s Lover,” the love-stricken frustrations of a nameless speaker end in a passionate, annihilating response to society’s scrutiny towards human sensuality. Cleverly juxtaposing Porphyria’s innocent femininity and her sexual transgression, Browning succeeds in displaying society’s contradictory embrace of morality next to its rejection of sensual pleasure. In an ironically tranquil…

Robert Browning wrote his poetry during the British , a tumultuous time in which society was going through major cultural and lifestyle changes. The modernization of England led to the distribution of newspapers and other literature that thrived on the scandals of others. This in turn contributed to the Victorians being constantly desensitized to occurrences…

In both Porphyria’s Lover and Andrea del Sarto, Robert Browning explores the notions of love and its capacity to corrupt an individual’s character and potential through his signature diegetic form; the dramatic monologue. While the form of these two poems is based around an implied audience, the primary agent and core subject matter is the…