Hopkins’s most distinctive feature is the ‘sprung rhythm’ he employs in his poetry, which means the rhythm and metre of his poems are often unpredictable and irregular, in order to capture human speech more faithfully. In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,Īs a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-ĭom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding It is this second part of the poem’s ‘argument’ that saves it from being overly sentimental.Ĩ. In the sonnet, Rossetti requests that the addressee of the poem remember her after she has died, but she goes on to add that it would be better for her loved one to forget her and be happy than to remember her and be sad. It was written in 1849 but not published until 1862 when it appeared in Rossetti’s first volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Written by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) when she was still a teenager, ‘Remember’ is a sonnet about mourning and remembrance. When you can no more hold me by the hand, (This is the sort of thing a Metaphysical Poet like John Donne had done in his poetry in the early seventeenth century.)

The final six-line unit (or sestet) of the poem then likens the poet’s experience of ‘discovering’ Homer to the discovery of a new planet (sure enough, the planet Uranus had been discovered by William Herschel in 1781) and to a Spanish conquistador’s sighting of the Pacific ocean. That is, until he encounters George Chapman’s English translation of Homer, at which point the world of the ancient Greek poet is suddenly and magically opened up to him. Keats could not appreciate Homer because he cannot read Greek. 1559-1634), likening the experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown land. Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,Īnd many goodly states and kingdoms seen Ĭomposed when Keats was just 20 years of age, this is one of his most widely anthologised sonnets. The poem focuses on Keats’s initial encounter with an English translation of Homer’s poetry by George Chapman (c.

Petrarchan sonnet examples by students