"The Darkling Thrush" is a poem by Thomas Hardy. Originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed", it was first published on 29 December 1900 in The Graphic. [1] The poem was later published in London Times on 1 January, 1901. [2] A deleted '1899' on the poem's manuscript suggests that it may have been written in that year. [3] It was later included in a collection entitled Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).
The last stanzas describe a bleak winter landscape at dusk, and the feeling of lifelessness that it produces. In stanza three, the melancholy atmosphere is transformed when "an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small" suddenly launches into "a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited." The final stanza muses that since there was no apparent cause for such an ecstatic outburst, the bird's singing must have been inspired by "some blessed Hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware." The use of the word "darkling" recalls the same word in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach (1867), a poem about loss of faith. [4]
"Invictus" is a short poem by the Victorian era British poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section Life and Death (Echoes).
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
John of the Cross, OCD was a Spanish Catholic priest, mystic, and a Carmelite friar of converso origin. He is a major figure of the Counter-Reformation in Spain, and he is one of the thirty-seven Doctors of the Church.
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
"Dies irae" is a Latin sequence attributed to either Thomas of Celano of the Franciscans (1200–1265) or to Latino Malabranca Orsini, lector at the Dominican studium at Santa Sabina, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. The sequence dates from the 13th century at the latest, though it is possible that it is much older, with some sources ascribing its origin to St. Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), or Bonaventure (1221–1274).
The song thrush is a thrush that breeds across the West Palearctic. It has brown upper-parts and black-spotted cream or buff underparts and has three recognised subspecies. Its distinctive song, which has repeated musical phrases, has frequently been referred to in poetry.
Hatikvah is the national anthem of the State of Israel. Part of 19th-century Jewish poetry, the theme of the Romantic composition reflects the 2,000-year-old desire of the Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel in order to reclaim it as a free and sovereign nation-state. The piece's lyrics are adapted from a work by Naftali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Złoczów, Austrian Galicia. Imber wrote the first version of the poem in 1877, when he was hosted by a Jewish scholar in Iași, Romania.
"Dover Beach" is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems; however, surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.
The bluebirds are a North American group of medium-sized, mostly insectivorous or omnivorous birds in the order of Passerines in the genus Sialia of the thrush family (Turdidae). Bluebirds are one of the few thrush genera in the Americas.
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".
"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country. Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard, the poem was completed when Gray was living near the Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges. It was sent to his friend Horace Walpole, who popularised the poem among London literary circles. Gray was eventually forced to publish the work on 15 February 1751 in order to preempt a magazine publisher from printing an unlicensed copy of the poem.
"For the Fallen" is a poem written by Laurence Binyon. It was first published in The Times in September 1914.
"The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)" is a poem by Thomas Hardy, published in 1912. The poem describes the sinking and wreckage of the ocean liner Titanic. "Convergence" consists of eleven stanzas (I to XI) of three lines each, following the AAA rhyme pattern.
"The Man He Killed" is a poem written by Thomas Hardy. Written in 1902, it was first published in Harper's Weekly, Nov. 8 1902. The first book publication was in his Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses.
"The Ruined Maid" is a satirical poem by Thomas Hardy. It was written in 1866 but first published, in a slightly bowdlerized form, in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).
"Poor Susan" is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth composed at Alfoxden in 1797. It was first published in the collection Lyrical Ballads in 1798. It is written in anapestic tetrameter.
Earth and Air and Rain is a song cycle for baritone and piano by Gerald Finzi (1901–56). It was composed between 1928 and 1935, and published in 1936 as his Op. 15. It consists of settings of ten poems by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).
Poems of the Past and the Present is the second collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1901. A wide-ranging collection, divided into five headings, it contains some of Hardy's most powerful and lasting poetic contributions.
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