Where does language live, and can we live there too?
In today’s poem Berry draws King Lear into his sabbath reflections.
Today’s poem typifies the earthy clarity that Welsh poet R.
Today’s poem traveled across many years and iterations to finally end up on the tongue of Samwise Gamgee in The Fellowship of the Ring. Happy reading!
Today’s poem illustrates the chief principle that good poetry and good comedy have in common: surprise.
Today’s poem is both metrical marvel and moving memorial.
Today’s poem touches the untouchable and visualizes the invisible.
Today’s poem is a classical example of Frost’s virtuosity in crafting solid figures–here trees, climbing, etc.–that stubbornly defy allegorizing, but that simultaneously seem effortlessly to point beyond themselves.
Today’s poem couples a vanished past with a timeless present.
Today’s poem captures an ever-present vein of melancholy and frustrated love in Yeats’ life–and is also the piece that helped me fall in love with his verse as a young man.
My old knee injury usually alerts me to changes in the weather, but in today’s poem Kooser offers a litany of other indicators.
Today’s poem discerns the difference between what you should tell newlyweds and what you should tell newlyweds on their wedding day.
Today’s poem is a tribute to the seasonal liftings-of-the-veil that reveal to us the beauty undergirding the world.
In today’s poem: the dignity of old age, and Charles Dodgson as the Victorian Weird Al.
In today’s poem, Eliot has lost an aunt and–just maybe–something more.
John Donne muses on the ineffability of a chaste love and devises a brilliant (or, at any rate, novel) scheme for reuniting with his loved one in the next life.
In today’s poem, the war poet Owen contends with the natural world, which carries on insensitive to the human suffering unfolding on the battlefield.
Tolkien was no believer in the power of geo-political solutions to better the state of man, convinced that his duty was to fight “the long defeat” while awaiting God’s miraculous and unlooked-for deliverance–eucatastrophe. Though he would not publish the Lord of the Rings for another twenty years, this 1931 poem shows much of that thinking was already well-formed. Happy reading.