This beautiful poem is the shortest on this list, at just four words long – but the art is in how cummings arranges those four words on the page.
Beautifully teasing yet elegant, its central image is enticing and memorable.Ĭummings (note the lower-case letters) was an American modernist and one of the most individual poets of the last hundred years, as the very styling of his name suggests. D.’, ponders a mysterious thing she finds in a pool, in a poem that raises more questions than it settles. In five brief free-verse lines, Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), also known as ‘H. Published in 1915, this poem is a classic example of imagism, that short-lived modernist movement in poetry that was active around the time of the First World War. Not conventionally beautiful, perhaps, but Williams alerts our attention to the latent beauty lurking within the most everyday of objects and sights. This one talks up the significance of the ordinary: here, a red wheelbarrow beside some white chickens. Williams wrote several short free-verse lyrics which are among the most quoted American poems of the twentieth century. William Carlos Williams, ‘ The Red Wheelbarrow’. It’s a beautifully moving poem about lovers divided but then, the speaker hopes, reunited in death.ħ. The French title of this poem, ‘A Quoi Bon Dire’, translates as ‘what good is there to say’. ‘A Quoi Bon Dire’ was published in Charlotte Mew’s 1916 volume The Farmer’s Bride. Joseph Hone, one of Yeats’s best biographers, records that Yeats once commented in a lecture that another of his poems, ‘ The Cap and Bells‘, was the way to win a woman, while ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ was the way to lose one.Ĭharlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a popular poet in her lifetime, and was admired by fellow poets Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy, among others indeed, Hardy helped to secure a Civil List pension for Mew in 1923. They never married, although Yeats asked her on several occasions. It was written for Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats loved for many years and viewed as his chief muse. One of Yeats’s short masterpieces, this poem is one of his most famous and widely anthologised lyrics: ‘Be careful because you tread on my dreams.’ It’s a beautifully lyrical exhortation to be treated kindly by one to whom one has pledged one’s life and heart. I would spread the cloths under your feet … Yeats, ‘ He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’.
#Lyrical poem examples skin
She has dark hair, but a (presumably) lighter skin tone and soft eyes.ĥ.
Indeed, the key aspect of ‘She Walks in Beauty’ is the contrast between light and dark throughout, and the way in which the woman’s beauty finds a way of reconciling these two apparent opposites.
The mood is of praise for the woman’s natural beauty, and the ways in which her prettiness is in harmony with the natural world of the starry sky and the night time. So, this is a quintessential romantic poem (a male poet praising a woman’s beauty) but also a Romantic poem, belonging to the movement in literature and art known as Romanticism. Perhaps Byron’s best-loved and most widely anthologised lyric poem, ‘She Walks in Beauty’ is quoted in Dead Poets Society as an attempt to seduce a young woman, and it epitomises the Romantic poem idolising (and idealising) a woman’s beauty, as the opening lines (quoted above) make clear.
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