The Passionate Shepherd to His Love is a famous pastoral song which generally sung to praise the rural life in the lap of nature. Pastoral poems are generally composed for the beloved of the shepherd, or on the death of the close friend or on the longing of the simple pleasurable life of the rustic setting. This lyrical poem is written in iambic tetrameter in six stanzas, each containing four lines.
Not Marble not the Gilded Monuments by William Shakespeare is composed in the form of sonnet giving the importance of rhyme or poetry over marble or monuments. The speaker takes the side of powerful rhyme against marble or monuments. The statue of prince is transitory and destructive but the rhymes are eternal.
One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand is a Spenserian sonnet. The Spenserian sonnet is broken up into four parts, with a couplet acting as an answer to the poem with the rhyming pattern of ababcdcdefefgg. The poet speaks of his trying to immortalize the woman he loves by writing her name in the sand.
From Fairest creatures we desire increase is a typical Shakespearean English sonnet no. 1 out of 154 with an octet, a quatrain and a couplet. Normally, in a sonnet a problem is shown in the octet and remaining six lines give the solution. Shakespeare commences his sonnet 1 by familiarizing his most crucial themes; immortality, time, procreation and self-centeredness.
Separation is a unique three-line modernist, rather a post-modernist, poem. With its typically open-ended nature, the poem demands a careful and tactful explanation of its understated implications. As the title of the poem suggests, it seems that the speaker (since the poet is a male, this is more likely) has been separated from his partner (most probably his wife, or a beloved).
As Rupert Brooke is one of the pioneers of war poetry, his The Dead III is a famous war poem written in the form of a sonnet. He has written another poem titled same as The Dead in his collection of five sonnets. This particular sonnet is the third one in the collection. Here Brooke praises the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the sake of England in the third World War and brought honor and fame back to home.
Queen-Anne's-Lace by William Carlos William is unconventional in its theme and subverts the traditional idea of 'female as flower' in the poem. The title comes from the name of a flower that grows in open grassy fields, and being white, which is identified with the image of female like vulnerable, tender, fragile, beautiful, and transient flower.
The poetic drama Samson Agonistes by John Milton is set in Gaza and is composed of dialogues between the blinded and imprisoned protagonist and different groups and individuals. A chorus of Hebrew friends comments upon what passes.
The poem 'Peter Quince at Clavier' is a meditative poem based on two allusions: one from Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream and the other from the Bible. The Shakespearean character Peter Quince was a rustic actor who clumsily performed a tragedy within the comic play.
The poem is based on Whitman’s ideas on the external forward movement of all things, through life, death and rebirth, and his ideas of an interrelationship of all people that transcends time and place. He reaches back to acknowledge the past and look forward to greet the wonderful future. The ferry, the people that cross on it, and the rushing water beneath, serve for Whitman as mystical symbols of an everlasting and unified flow of humanity from the present into the future.