Category: Mumming

“Ozymandias“is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was the result of a friendly competition between Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith, using the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, Ozymandias being the Greek […]

“When You Are Old” is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In the poem, which is published in Yeats’s second collection, The Rose (1893), the speaker asks someone to think ahead to old age, strongly suggesting that the addressee will eventually regret being unwilling to return the speaker’s love. Though the poem […]

“To His Coy Mistress” is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678). It is considered one of Marvell’s finest and is possibly the best recognised carpe diem poem in English. It was written during or just before the English Interregnum (1649–1660)—perhaps in the early 1650s when Marvell was serving […]

Coleridge’s masterpiece, “Kubla Khan,” came to him in an opium dream after he passed out reading Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimage. He claimed that its fragmentary nature (its subtitle is “Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”) was due to a sudden interruption from a visitor as he was transcribing his vision The following fragment is […]

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is a lyric poem in ballad metre by American poet Emily Dickinson. The poem’s manuscript appears in Fascicle 13, which Dickinson compiled around 1861. It is one of 19 poems in the collection. Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” is also in this collection. With the discovery […]

“Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem in the form of a villanelle by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), and is one of his best-known works. Though first published in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951, Thomas wrote the poem in 1947 while visiting Florence with his family. The poem was […]

“The Second Coming” is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe. […]

[The Devil, carrying a clipboard, descends from stairs amid swirling smoke and screams of anguish. The Devil looks at the audience and starts his speech:] Hello, nice to see you all again.Now, as the more perceptive of you have probably realised by now, this is Hell, and I am the Devil. Good evening. You can […]

“The New Colossus” is a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal’s lower level. This poem […]