Kubla Khan was written in 1798 but not published until 1816. It was then issued in a pamphlet containing Christabel and The Pains of Sleep. It is one of those three poems which have made Coleridge, one of the greatest poets of England, the other two being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.
The poem Journey of the Magi is based on the theme of the Bible. It is full of religious feeling. The visit of the Three Wise Men of East to Palestine at the time of Christ's birth has been described in a very realistic way. The wise men started their journey in the extreme cold of the winter to reach the place of Christ's birth to offer presents to him.
The Garden by Andrew Marvell is a unique poem which is romantic in its expression, metaphysical in its word-game, and classical in its music. It is romantic because it is about the nature in subject and theme, and it is the expression of the poet's personal and emotional feelings about life in the nature (and society).
The poem The Mother is an anti-abortion poem by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. It is an emotional outpour of the sense of guilt by a mother who has performed one or more abortion. She first speaks to the mothers who have done abortions like herself. She tells them how they will never forget their 'killed' children.
The speaker is passively exposed to the photograph in Atwood's poem This Is a Photograph of Me. Thematically, the title is in passive, the first sentence is in passive voice. This is a photo others have taken of me. This is a history of me which others have created. The others are males who are active to make history of females.
The poet William Shakespeare thinks that his love is incomparable. He can’t compare her to the summer’s days because; she is lovelier and milder than it. In summer the stormy winds weaken the charming rosebuds and the prospect of renewed health or happiness lasts for a very short time. The sun is occasionally very hot and its golden rays are often dim.
Browning’s My Last Duchess is an exemplary dramatic monologue for which Browning is best known. The drama that this poem represents is set in ‘Ferrara’, the capital of a province in Italy that was famous for its ‘high’ culture during the Renaissance. This setting also hints at the fact that the poem’s story is historical: a real incident of this kind had happened.
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins is a semi-romantic, religious poem dedicated to Christ. It is a usual Hopkinsian sonnet that begins with description of nature and ends in meditation about God and Christ and his beauty, greatness and grace. The poem also uses his usual “sprung rhythm”, Anglo-Saxon diction, alliteration, internal rhyming, new compound metaphors, elliptical grammar and complex threads of connotation.
The poem The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin is about the poet's journey to London in a train. The day is a Whitsun Day on which the British Government frees marriage taxes for one day. Therefore the day fascinates people belonging to the lower economic class because they cannot afford the payment of marriage taxes on other days. The poem on the surface level is a description of these experiences of that particular day.
Buffalo Bill's by Cummings plays with more than one possibility of meaning and attitude of the poet towards the subject, the dead hero, Buffalo Bill. In one sense, the poem is an expression of respect towards the heroic personality of the man. But if we read the poem critically, we sense that the poet is satirizing the traditional heroism of killing the armless and harmless animals with guns, from a distance! The reader is left free to interpret in his own way.