The poem Punishment by Seamus Heaney was inspired by the discovery of a dead body of a young girl who was believed to be killed on the charge of adultery. Heaney takes this discovery as an ancient example of brutality and links it with the modern form of brutality which is evident of Irish rebel's killing of Irish girls who marry British soldiers.
A Prayer for My Daughter by William Butler Yeats opens with an image of the newborn child sleeping in a cradle. A storm is raging with great fury outside his residence. A great gloom is on Yeats’ mind and is consumed with anxiety as to how to protect his child from the tide of hard times ahead. The poet keeps walking and praying for the young child and as he does so he is in a state of reverie. He feels a kind of gloom and worry about the future of his daughter.
In Dover Beach Matthew Arnold is describing the slow and solemn rumbling sound made by the sea waves as they swing backward and forward on the pebbly shore. One can clearly hear this monotonous sound all the time. The withdrawing waves roll the pebbles back towards the sea, and then after a pause, the returning waves roll them up the shore.
Mac Flecknoe is the finest short satirical poem in which Dryden has treated Thomas Sahdwell with humorous contempt. Mac Flecknoe is both a personal and literary satire. Dryden presents Shadwell as a dull poetaster, a corpulent man and a plagiarist. Dryden’s uses the heroic couplet for satirical purposes.
The Unknown Citizen, first published in the Listener on August 1939, and later included in the Collected Shorter Poems, 1950, is a satire, not on the citizen, but on the way in which the average man in the street is controlled by the conventions of bureaucracy and the Welfare State which ignore the need for a man to be free and happy.
By unanimous consent 'On His Blindness' is Milton's best sonnet in which English poetic art attains a sublime height. Actually, it is not a mere poem. It is the inner voice of a man who has resigned himself entirely to the will of God and depends only on His mercy and justice.
The first canto of Don Juan contains basically the introduction to the main character Don Juan, besides some story by way of introducing his parents and his first love affair. Byron, however, manages to expose so many things of the 'vain culture' of his society by means of the many digressions and passing comments. The delightful story is intended to give the reader some corrective laughter.
The epic is a narrative poem, of supposed divine inspiration, treating of a subject of great and momentous importance for mankind, the characters of the story being partly human and partly divine, and the language and style in which the incidents are related being full of elevation and dignity.
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas is an autobiographical poem in which Thomas uses the memories of childhood days in order to explore the theme of a journey from innocence to experience. The theme is based on William Blake’s division the world of experience and it is reinforced through the use of Wordsworthian double consciousness.
The poem The Ecstasy is one of John Donne's most popular poems, which expresses his unique and unconventional ideas about love. It expounds the theme that pure, spiritual or real love can exist only in the bond of souls established by the bodies. For Donne, true love only exists when both bodies and souls are inextricably united. Donne criticizes the platonic lover who excludes the body and emphasizes the soul.