On His Having Arrived At The Of Twenty Three
Milton's sonnet is a reflection about himself at the age of twenty-three. In it, he assesses himself in terms of his personal maturity, suggesting that he doesn't appear to be as mature as others of his age, but that he may be more mature than he appears. Maturity here can be interpreted in terms of achievement and accomplishment, as well as in personal growth and understanding. Milton is thought to have written the sonnet shortly after graduating from Cambridge University, and the poem is very consistent with the thoughts of a young man who has completed the early phase of his life and is about to move into a wider world.

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
Home they Brought her Warrior Dead tells the story of a woman who lost her husband in battle. The third person narrative allows the reader to see the widow’s reaction from an outside perspective. The reader, therefore, identifies with the rest of the crowd of gathered people, and experiences the same concern for the widow and confusion at her reaction. For the first few stanzas, the widow is seen only as a woman who has lost her husband. However, the last stanza reveals that she is not only a widow but also a mother. This insight sheds light onto her reaction, allowing the readers to understand what had been going through her mind as she realized that her husband was dead and she would have to raise the child alone.



Home they Brought her Warrior Dead Analysis
Stanza 1
Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
‘She must weep or she will die.’

The speaker describes the reaction of a woman when her dead husband was brought back to her. Her grief is so overwhelming, she cannot even cry. She didn’t faint or swoon or make even a noise. Her friends watched her, and they became worried about her because she seemed not to grieve properly. They thought she might die if she did not weep as she should. They believed that if this woman did not grieve, the pain she refused to let out would eventually kill her.



Stanza 2
Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

As in many instances of death, the people around the dead man praised him. They talked about his life, about the good that he did. They “called him worthy to be loved” and they talked about the kind of friend he was to them. They called him “true” and “noble”. Yet, as the people around her grieved and spoke memories, the wife of the dead man could not speak nor move. She remained still. No one knew what was going on in her mind, but she seemed to be in a state of shock. No amount of reminiscence seemed to bring tears to the widow’s eyes. She was yet unmoved. Perhaps she was unable to accept the death, even as those around her spoke of him and paid tribute to his memory. The people around her are not sure why the woman refuses to show emotion, but they surround her with words of praise for her husband, hoping to break her out of her shock so that they might be there to comfort her.



Stanza 3
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stepped,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Because the woman still refuses to grieve, one of the young women present walks up to the dead man, and removes the cloth that was covering his face. Perhaps she thought that his wife was unable to grieve because she still could not believe or accept that this dead man was her husband. The people around the widow clearly believe that the woman ought to grieve. Thus, because she will not show any signs of grief when the people speak of him, this particular friend shows her the face of her late husband, hoping that this will help the woman to break out of her state of shock and be able to grieve properly.



Stanza 4
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’

With this stanza, the speaker finally reveals to the readers the reason for the widow’s silence. She has not been unfeeling or careless of her husband’s death. She has not even been in shock or disbelief like the people around her thought. Rather, she has been paralyzed with fear. She did not think about her own pain at losing her husband. Rather, she thought of the poor child. It was not until she saw the child’s nurse sit the child “upon her knee” that she burst forth in uncontrollable tears that came “like a summer tempest”. She cried out, “Sweet my child, I live for thee”.

This poem truly reveals the heart of a mother. When the dead warrior was brought home, the people expected her to behave as they would expect a widow to behave. But the widow was also a mother, and her mothering instincts led her to think of of the child before she could think of herself. While she looked at the dead man before her, she was not in shock or disbelief. She was not unmoved or unfeeling. She was struck with fear for her child who would grow up fatherless. The widow turned to see her child, and cried out her promise that she would take care of the child and live for the child. It was at that moment that the widow was able to grieve for her own loss. Once she had determined herself to live for her child and to shield and protect the child even though the child no longer had a father, then she was able to think about her own loss and let out her grief in tears.

Ozymandias
Here is an analysis of Ozymandias, a poem written by one of the greatest Romantic poets in history, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley never achieved fame while he was alive, but he did keep company with some extremely talented writers: his good friends included George Gordon Lord Byron and John Keats, and he was married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley most popular works include Ozymandias, To a Skylark, and Prometheus Unbound, which is perhaps his most lauded work. Born into a well-to-do family, Shelley eventually attended Oxford, where he first started his writing career. He was expelled, however, when he refused to admit that he was the author of an anonymous text on atheism. Shelley met and fell in love with a young Mary Godwin, even though he was already married. He abandoned his family to be with her; they married after his first wife committed suicide, and Mary changed her surname to Shelley. Tragically, Shelley died young, at the age of 29, when the boat he was sailing got caught in a storm. His body washed to shore some time later.



Summary of Ozymandias
In this poem, the speaker describes meeting a traveler “from an antique land.” The title, ‘Ozymandias’, notifies the reader that this land is most probably Egypt, since Ozymandias was what the Greeks called Ramses II, a great and terrible pharaoh in ancient Egypt. The traveler tells a story to the speaker. In the story, he describes visiting Egypt and seeing a large and intimidating statue in the sand. He can tell that the sculptor must have known his subject well because it is obvious from the statues face that this man was a great leader, but one who could also be very vicious: he describes his sneer as having a “cold command.” Even though the leader was probably very great, it seems that the only thing that survives from his realm is this statue, which is half buried and somewhat falling apart.



Breakdown Analysis of Ozymandias
Ozymandias is considered to be a Petrarchan sonnet, even though the rhyme scheme varies slightly from the traditional form. As all sonnets are, this poem contains fourteen lines and is written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme of Ozymandias is ababacdcedefef. This rhyme scheme differs from the rhyme scheme of a traditional Petrarchan sonnet, whose octave (the first eight lines of the poem) usually has a rhyme scheme of abbaabba; its sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet) does not have an assigned rhyme scheme, but it usually rhymes every other line, or contains three different rhymes. Shelley’s defiance of this rhyme scheme helps to set apart Ozymandias from other Petrarchan sonnets, and it is perhaps why this poem is so memorable.

To start, Ozymandias carries an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem. All around the traveler is desert—nothing is green or growing; the land is barren. The statue, however, still boasts of the accomplishments this civilization had in the past. The desert represents the fall of all empires—nothing powerful and rich can ever stay that strong forever. This metaphor is made even more commanding in the poem by Shelley’s use of an actual ruler—Shelley utilizes an allusion to a powerful ruler in ancient Egypt to show that even someone so all-powerful will eventually fall.

The sonnet itself reads more like a story than a poem, although the line rhymes do help to remind the reader that this is not prose. The speaker in the poem, perhaps Percy Bysshe Shelley, tells the story from his point of view, using the pronoun “I.” The first line reads, “I met a traveler from an antique land…” At first, this line is a tad ambiguous: Is the traveler from an antique land, or did he just come back from visiting one? The reader also does not know where the speaker first met this sojourner. The title indicates which land the traveler has visited: The Greeks called Ramses II, a powerful Egyptian pharaoh, Ozymandias, so it is easy for the reader to recognize the antique land as Egypt, one of the oldest civilizations in the world. The lines that follow are much clearer than the first, however, and it is clear to the reader what, exactly, is occurring in the sonnet. The rest of the sonnet is actually written in dialogue; the traveler is recounting his experiences in Egypt to the poem’s speaker. Lines two through fourteen are only one sentence in length, as well. These lines also contain some of the most vivid and beautiful imagery in all of poetry. Shelley was such a masterful writer that it does not take much effort on the part of the reader to clearly imagine the scene in this poem. In lines two through five, the traveler describes a statue he sees in Egypt. Shelley writes:

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command…

In these lines, the reader, through the eyes of the traveler, sees two massive legs carved from stone lying in the desert sand. Nearby, the face of the statue is half-buried. The face is broken, but the traveler can still see the sculpture is wearing a frown and a sneer. From this, he is able to tell that this ruler probably had absolutely power, and he most definitely ruled with an iron fist. It is also easy to interpret that this ruler probably had a lot of pride as the supreme leader of his civilization.

The traveler then turns his attention to the sculptor who made the statue, commenting that whomever the sculptor is, he knew his subject very well. Shelley writes, “Tell that its sculptor well those passions read/Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things…” Shelley also seems to be commenting in line seven that while there is an end to natural life, art is eternal—it survives.

Lines eight through eleven give more details about the sculpture, and the latter ones include words that have been etched into the ruler’s pedestal. Shelley writes,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The traveler provides interesting insight into the leader here. First, his hands show that the pharaoh mocked his people, yet his heart was not all bad: he fed and cared for his people, as well. This line provides an interesting dichotomy often found in the most terrible of leaders. The words written on the pedestal on which the leader sits also tells of Ozymandias’ personality. He is ordering those who see him to look upon all that he has created, but do not appreciate what he has done. Instead, despair and be afraid of it. These words perfectly depict the leader’s hubris.

The last three lines, however, take on a different tone. Now, the leader is gone, and so is his empire. Shelley implements irony into these lines to show that even though this broken statue remains, the leader’s civilization does not. It has fallen, much like the statue, and has turned to dust. Shelley writes,

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

These are powerful lines, and the traveler almost seems to be mocking the ruler. Shelley’s diction here is important. He uses words such as decay and bare to show just how powerless this once-mighty pharaoh has become. There is absolutely nothing left. The leader, much like his land, and much like the broken statue depicting him, has fallen. It is in these lines that the theme of the poem emerges: All leaders will eventually pass, and all civilizations will eventually fall.

Ode on Solitude
When a poem title begins with something to the effect of “ode on,” or uses words such as “commentary,” the reader is typically given a pretty good idea of what the poem is about early on. Of course, it would be far too simple an analysis to say that Alexander Pope’s oldest surviving poem, Ode on Solitude, is simply “about solitude,” but it does provide a solid starting point from which to analyse the poem. Clearly, when Pope wrote his work, he had the idea of solitude in mind, as do a great many poets who express themselves best through the written word, and perhaps less so in the company of others. Solitude itself is an important thing to attain from time to time, and perhaps it makes sense to think of one of Pope’s oldest poems as being about a very basic human desire.



Ode on Solitude Analysis
Verse by Verse
Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

In his own ground.

This first verse of Ode on Solitude begins the analogy that will carry through the poem, seen through the life of an anonymous man who is described as being an ideal for happiness. His deepest desires, the narrator notes, extends a few acres of his own land, where he is content to live and work. The inclusion of the word “parental” suggests that the land belongs to this man by inheritance, and therefore belongs solely to him. “Content to breathe his native air” could also be a commentary on being happy with what a person has, rather than constantly wishing for more (although this might not have been quite as significant an idea in 1700, when the poem was written, as it may be interpreted today).

The verse structure and rhyming pattern is established here; three lines of eight syllables each, followed by one line of four syllables, rhyming in an ABAB pattern. This persists up until the final two stanzas, at which point the final line lengthens to five syllables.

Whose heards with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire.

This verse simply means that the man is self-sufficient. His land, now shown to be a farm, provides for all of his needs — his herds provide him with milk, he is able to bake his own bread. In the summer, his trees provide ample shade, and in the winter the wood from those same trees can be lit to keep him warm. He has no need of anything beyond his own land.

While this verse reads strangely, as “bread” and “shade” do not rhyme, it is important to remember that Ode on Solitude was written over three hundred years ago. During this period in Britain, “bread” was pronounced with a longer vowel sound. While word pronunciation is a difficult thing to estimate and predict throughout different eras of history, it makes sense to believe that at one point, “bread” and “shade” could be used as rhymes for one another.

Blest! who can unconcern’dly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

Quiet by day,

The narrator considered this farmer blessed! Time almost doesn’t have meaning for this man; his world provides for all of his needs. Hours go by, days go by, years go by, and everything remains the same. The health the man is in at the beginning of this cycle is the health he remains in when it is finished. Peace of mind is normal for him — what is there to trouble him? It seems as though, in a world of peace and quiet, there is absolutely nothing that could disrupt the life of this farmer, and the narrator sees that as a high blessing.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease

Together mix’d; sweet recreation,

And innocence, which most does please,

With meditation.

This verse sees the start of the final lines being five syllables long, and continues the sentiment of the verse before it. The idea of innocence is introduced here, and is a fair way to describe a man who lives his life in isolation; he is innocent, which means he himself probably doesn’t appreciate the kind of life he leads in the same way the narrator, author, or reader does. It’s a strange idea and casts the character of the farmer in a different light. He could, in fact, be viewed as a naïve and ignorant individual, one who simply doesn’t know enough about the world, or he could be viewed as living the ideal life.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me dye;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

Tell where I lye.

The narrator of the poem clearly agrees with the latter of the above sentiments — here he wishes for escapism, and begs for an unseen life, one where he may live in solitude until his dying days, which will come and go, unnoticed, unremarked, and unadorned, a perfect life of solitude and peace.



Historic Context
Because of the very mature concepts expressed by Ode on Solitude, particularly the bit about wishing to die alone, many might be surprised to learn that Alexander Pope wrote Ode on Solitude in 1700, at the age of twelve. At the time, Pope had just moved to a small estate by a forest, in a small village far from the main British towns. His family had been forced to live there because of their Catholic faith, and it could be here, in the village now known as Popeswood (named after Pope himself) that the young child found his ideals in solitude, undoubtedly being inspired by his new natural landscape, particularly the Windsor Forest.

It was also at this time that Pope’s formal education ended, another unfortunate result of being Catholic at the time. However, instead of giving up on learning altogether, Pope attempted to educate himself, drawing on classical literature, paying particular attention to well-known poets of the era.

With all of this background, it is altogether unsurprising that one of Pope’s earliest works would be a very mature poem about solitude. Abandoned largely by the world, it makes sense to think that solace in solitude was an everyday occurrence for the young Alexander Pope. When discussing earlier whether an entirely isolated farmer was a man to be looked down upon for his naïvety or respected for his independence, the perspective of Pope is clear — he envies the man. Understanding that Pope was essentially forced out of mainstream society because of his religious beliefs might lead one to believe that Pope would have viewed total exclusion from that mainstream society as the best thing that could happen to a person.

It is difficult to enter the mindset of the twelve-year-old Alexander Pope. When we writes, “let me live, unseen, unknown,” is is almost sad to think that this is not at all what happened — Pope did not live a life of seclusion but rather was a respected poet during his time, and remains so today. Whether or not he changed his views on solitude is difficult to say. What is clear is that his Ode on Solitude was just the start of what would eventually become a literary career of classical fame and definite ingenuity for the now-famous Alexander Pope.

Sonnet 18
Although William Shakespeare is best known as a playwright, he is also the poet behind 154 sonnets, which were collected for the first time in a collection in 1609. Based on the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, Shakespeare’s sonnets differ from the norm by addressing not only a young woman – which was the norm in Italy – but also a young man, known throughout as the Fair Youth. Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? is one of the Fair Youth poems, addressed to a mysterious male figure that scholars have been unable to pin down. A total of 126 of the 154 sonnets are largely taken to be addressed to the Fair Youth, which some scholars have also taken as proof of William Shakespeare’s homosexuality.



Summary
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? attempts to justify the speaker’s beloved’s beauty by comparing it to a summer’s day, and comes to the conclusion that his beloved is better after listing some of the summer’s negative qualities. While summer is short and occasionally too hot, his beloved has a beauty that is everlasting, and that will never be uncomfortable to gaze upon. This also riffs – as Sonnet 130 does – on the romantic poetry of the age, the attempt to compare a beloved to something greater than them. Although in Sonnet 130, Shakespeare is mocking the over-flowery language, in Sonnet 18, Shakespeare’s simplicity of imagery shows that that is not the case. The beloved’s beauty can coexist with summer, and indeed be more pleasant, but it is not a replacement for it.



Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?Analysis
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The poem opens with the speaker putting forward a simple question: can he compare his lover to a summer’s day? Historically, the theme of summertime has always been used to evoke a certain amount of beauty, particularly in poetry. Summer has always been seen as the respite from the long, bitter winter, a growing period where the earth flourishes itself with flowers and with animals once more. Thus, to compare his lover to a summer’s day, the speaker considers their beloved to be tantamount to a rebirth, and even better than summer itself.

As summer is occasionally short, too hot, and rough, summer is, in fact, not the height of beauty for this particular speaker. Instead, he attributes that quality to his beloved, whose beauty will never fade, even when ‘death brag thou waander’stin his shade‘, as he will immortalize his lover’s beauty in his verse.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The immortality of love and beauty through poetry provides the speaker with his beloved’s eternal summer. Though they might die and be lost to time, the poem will survive, will be spoken of, will live on when they do not. Thus, through the words, his beloved’s beauty will also live on.

In terms of imagery, there is not much that one can say about it. William Shakespeare’s sonnets thrive on a simplicity of imagery, at a polar opposite to his plays, whose imagery can sometimes be packed with meaning. Here, in this particular sonnet, the feeling of summer is evoked through references to the ‘darling buds‘ of May, and through the description of the sun as golden-complexioned. It is almost ironic that we are not given a description of the lover in particular. In fact, scholars have argued that, as a love poem, the vagueness of the beloved’s description leads them to believe that it is not a love poem written to a person, but a love poem about itself; a love poem about love poetry, which shall live on with the excuse of being a love poem. The final two lines seem to corroborate this view, as it moves away from the description of the lover to point out the longevity of his own poem. As long as men can read and breathe, his poem shall live on, and his lover, too, will live on, because he is the subject of this poem.

However, opinions are divided on this topic.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are all written in iambic pentameter – an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable, with five of these in each line – with a rhyming couplet at the end.

Success is Counted Sweetest
The theme of Emily Dickinson's poem "Success Is Counted Sweetest" is that doing without something makes a person appreciate its worth more than actually having it does. The theme is revealed in the first two lines of the poem which read, "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed." In other words, no one appreciates the feeling of success better than a person who experiences failure.
Those who do without in this poem do not do so by decision. They want what it is they do not have and, by not having it, want it even more. The poem goes on to say that to understand fully the satisfaction and joy of victory, one must suffer defeat and have to listen to the joyous cries of the winner. Dickinson sends a similar message in her poem "Water, Is Taught by Thirst," in which she alludes to the fact that only the truly thirsty appreciate all that water offers. This theme is a common one in everyday language. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" is a popular saying with similar meaning. Emily Dickinson lived a fairly reclusive life and went unrecognized in her work. She knew that her life was one of denial, a state she apparently chose for herself. This lifestyle, however, made her more sensitive and more poetic.

Love and Friendship
Love: Brontë refers to romantic love in this poem and warns the reader that, though lovely, it is transient and will not last.	‘Yet wait till winter comes again/ And who will call the wild-briar fair?’	Brontë starts the poem with a simile, comparing love to ‘the wild rose-briar’. She goes on to show how the rose changes through the seasons, implying that love will also fade.
Friendship: On the other hand, Brontë suggests that friendship is steady and constant and able to sustain all difficulties.	‘But which will bloom most constantly?’	Friendship is compared to the holly-tree which stays green throughout the year. Brontë suggests that this quality of consistency is shared by true friendship.
Seasons: Brontë uses the seasons to represent different times in both friendship and love.	‘The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring’	During spring and summer, the wild rose-briar is in bloom and its flowers ‘scent the air’. The seasons represent the times when love is also new and easy. Brontë suggests that winter is a more difficult time and that love, like the rose, might not survive the challenges posed by the colder season.

How Do I Love Thee?
Here is an analysis of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-third sonnet, which is alternately titled as How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways. This alternate title also doubles as the first line of the poem. Barrett Browning is a renowned Victorian poet who managed to achieve acclaim in her lifetime. She went on to influence many British and American poets, particularly Emily Dickinson. A prolific writer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems came to the attention of another famous poet of the time, Robert Browning. The two poets eventually married, but were forced to wed secretly because of Barrett Browning’s father. He found out about the nuptials and disinherited his daughter. Barrett Browning and her husband moved to Italy, and both encouraged the other with their writings. She died in Italy at the age of 55.



Sonnet 43 Poem Summary
Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnet 43 is easily one of the most famous and recognizable poems in the English language. In the poem, the speaker is proclaiming her unending passion for her beloved. She tells her lover just how deeply her love goes, and she also tells him how she loves him. She loves him with all of her being, and she hopes God will grant her the ability to love him even after she has passed.



Breakdown Analysis of Sonnet 43
This poem is classified as a sonnet because it contains fourteen lines of poetry and has a fixed rhyme scheme of abba abba cdcd cd.  One can assume that Barrett Browning is also the speaker of the poem, since it is well known just how deeply she and Robert Browning loved and cared for each other.  The speaker is talking directly to her beloved in the sonnet; she uses personal pronouns such as “I” and “you.”

Based on the initial line, it appears that the speaker has been asked a question prior to reciting the poem. The first line also serves as the motivation for the rest of the work.  Barrett Browning writes, “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.”  She then uses the last thirteen lines of the poem to show just how much she loves her husband.

Lines 2-4 of the poem provide the first way in which the speaker loves her husband.  Barrett Browning writes, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/For the ends of being and ideal grace.”  Here she is describing that her love is as deep and wide and tall as it can possibly be.  It is so deep and wide and tall, in fact, that she cannot even “see” the edges of it: it is infinite.    Barrett Browning uses consonance in line two in order to convey just how much she loves her husband.  The repetition of the “th” sound gives the line movement, which signifies that her love for him is ongoing.

In the next two lines, Barrett Browning continues to show her husband how much she loves him.  She writes, “I love thee to the level of every day’s/Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”  These lines are particularly lovely in their simplicity.  While her love knows no bounds, the speaker also loves her beloved in ordinary, everyday life.  She needs him as much as she needs other basic necessities of life.

In lines seven and eight, Barrett Browning writes of two others ways she loves.  She writes, “I love thee freely, as men strive for right.  I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.”  These lines give an innate sense of feeling to her love.  Just as men naturally strive to do what is good and right, she freely loves.  In addition, she loves him purely, just as men turn from praise in order to maintain humility.  The speaker does not want thanks or attention for her love; just like good and just men, she loves because it is what she has to do.  Using these two similes in these two lines strengthens the tone of love and adoration in the poem.

Barrett Browning continues with the pattern of showing how much she loves her husband.  She writes, “I love thee with the passion put to use/In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.”  Barrett Browning’s diction here is interesting, particularly because she is taking the feelings she has about something relatively negative and comparing it to the feelings she has for her husband.  Old griefs can be defines as anything that a person passionately despises.  She is telling her husband here that she has as much passion for him as she does for those things in life that she just cannot stand.  She also loves him with the faith of a child, which is a particularly lovely line.  Children’s faith is usually steadfast and true.  Just like a child has faith, so, too, does the speaker have love for her husband.

Barrett Browning continues with this religious motif in the next lines.  She writes, “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints.  I love thee with the breath,/Smiles, tears, of all my life…”  Her “lost saints” is a reference to all of those people she once loved and adored in her life.  The love she once felt for them, that she eventually lost, has now been transferred into the love she feels for her husband.  Additionally, she loves him with all that she is: her breath, her smiles, and her tears.  Barrett Browning confesses that she loves her husband with all that has made up her life.

Barrett Browning ends her poem by acknowledging that she is willing to love her husband forever, if God chooses to allow her to do so.  She writes, “…and, if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death.”  Not only will she love him well into eternity, she writes, but she will also love him even better than she does presently.  Her love will continue to grow with the passing of time, regardless of whether or not she or he are still alive.  The speaker’s love for her husband is so strong that not even death could destroy it.

What is Life?
Like Wordsworth, Coleridge idealized nature and used as a starting point for emphasis on human joy, even though his poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech.

Death resembles Life although it was seen as that which sheds light on Life. Note that the poem is composed of rhetorical metaphysical questions about human vision and conceptualization of Life and Death which according to the poet are bound up together in human consciousness. Life and Death are locked together as if in "A war-embrace of wrestling". Given this kind of situation, does consciousness still to be entrusted as the absolute light, "By encroach of darkness made ?"
And if not,
"Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?"
then what exactly constitutes "all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath"?

The Road Not Taken
At its heart, this poem is about choice: how one decision can affect our entire lives. The speaker chose one path over another, and that, he says, "has made all the difference."
The fork in the road is symbolic of the choice the speaker has to make about his life. Each path corresponds to a different direction in life, so he has to choose carefully.
Structurally, this poem consists of four stanzas of five lines following an ABAAB rhyme scheme.
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“The Road Not Taken” is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most popular poems. It is made up of four stanzas of five lines each, and each line has between eight and ten syllables in a roughly iambic rhythm; the lines in each stanza rhyme in an abaab pattern. The popularity of the poem is largely a result of the simplicity of its symbolism: The speaker must choose between diverging paths in a wood, and he sees that choice as a metaphor for choosing between different directions in life. Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation and how the reader is to view the speaker. In 1961, Frost himself commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky.”

Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created for the purposes of the poem. According to the Lawrance Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.”

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker, while walking on an autumn day in a forest where the leaves have changed to yellow, must choose between two paths that head in different directions. He regrets that he cannot follow both roads, but since that is not possible, he pauses for a long while to consider his choice. In the first stanza and the beginning of the second, one road seems preferable; however, by the beginning of the third stanza he has decided that the paths are roughly equivalent. Later in the third stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by reassuring himself that he will return someday and walk the other road.

At the end of the third stanza and in the fourth, however, the speaker resumes his initial tone of sorrow and regret. He realizes that he probably will never return to walk the alternate path, and in the fourth stanza he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the future. The speaker believes that when he looks back years later, he will see that he had actually chosen the “less traveled” road. He also thinks that he will later realize what a large difference this choice has made in his life. Two important details suggest that the speaker believes that he will later regret having followed his chosen road: One is the idea that he will “sigh” as he tells this story, and the other is that the poem is entitled “The Road Not Taken”—implying that he will never stop thinking about the other path he might have followed.

Tree At My Window
For what's its worth, LWschool, here's my take (teacher's view point)
The first part refers to relationship b/w writer & tree-sash is part of a window frame and this means although window closed at night, tree & writer are share a close relationship-also window we can see through so tree 'sees' through the writer
Second part discusses how tree causes writer to reflect internally or dream-light tongues (leaves that make food with light) may make 'noise' in wind, but not all 'talking' all the time-causes writer to think about outcomes-could be reflective upon seasons (no leaves-winter, budding in spring, full growth summer and changing colors in fall) or maybe deeper more 'profound' thoughts like cycles in life...seasons of change
Next section states that each has 'seen' the other through the worst or when off guard/unable to control outcome-writer saw outward changes while tree witnessed internal strife while writer slept/was dreaming.
The last stanza shares how they are so different in form and nature, yet they both are linked by 'weather'-tree affected by external damage caused by weather & writer internal damage-'weather' as in the verb form 'to withstand'.

On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
The dominant images are those of travel and discovery: ‘states and kingdoms’, ‘islands’, ‘new planet’, ‘the Pacific’. Keats presents himself as one of the explorers of the past, giving his explorations in the realms of literature a similar sense of adventure and heroism.

The image of explorers confronted with a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon is particularly powerful. The poem’s final image of Cortez frozen into awestruck silence at the sight of the Pacific Ocean’s vastness is vividly dramatic – especially when contrasted by his men’s ‘wild surmise’ as they try to guess what can have elicited such a response from their ‘stout’ leader.

Keats’ school reading is evident in his reference to the ‘new planet’ in l. 10. The words echo the vivid description of Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy given to Keats as a school prize in 1811.

Riches

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were characterised by a quest not only to discover, but to claim and colonise, the riches of new-found lands. Explorers were as much driven by the promise of vast wealth (for example, seeking the fabled land of El Dorado, the golden city and kingdom of the Golden King) as by the excitement of discovery. Though we have a more ambivalent attitude towards this today, in Keats’ era, the consequent wealth of the British Empire from its colonies was a source of pride.

Thus Keats can use the image of explorers appropriating wealth as a positive metaphor for the riches he has taken from reading Chapman’s translation of Homer. He already describes his previous reading as travelling in ‘realms of gold’: now he is appropriating what had thus far been Homer’s ‘demesne’, just as Cortez (clearly regarded positively in this sonnet) took over the kingdom of the Aztecs and seized Mexico for Spain.

Investigating imagery and symbolism in On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer...

Why should the image of explorers discovering a mighty ocean be appropriate in a poem about literary discovery?
Keats does not make explicit the feelings experienced by the astronomer discovering a new planet – but how does Keats language suggest his degree of excitement?
Look at the order of the details Keats provides about Cortez. How does the structure of the image contribute to its effect?
Themes in On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer

Responding to literary art

The sonnet is a response to the imaginative power and vision of both Homer, the ancient Greek epic poet, and George Chapman, the Elizabethan poet, who translated Homer into English. The most widely read version of Homer available to readers of Keats’ day had to that point been the one by Alexander Pope, an eighteenth century poet whose rhyming couplet translation, whilst being rational, orderly and controlled, lacked the raw power of the original Greek. When Keats writes about Chapman’s translation as ‘speak[ing] out loud and bold’, he is making a clear distinction between the more muscular style of the Chapman and the elegantly balanced and controlled version of Pope.

Keats claiming his poetic vocation

Poetry is here seen as an empire of the mind, something which sets free the imagination and which is, in fact, an imaginative conquest. The poem marks a turning-point in Keats’ development. The full power of the god Apollo has been revealed to him and there can be no doubt that Keats has found his literary vocation. He has discovered not only Chapman’s Homer but also his true poetic self.

This is all the more powerful when we understand Keats’ humble background. Andrew Motion (Keats, 1997) suggests that the poem is ‘about exclusion as well as inclusion. Its title suggests that Keats had come late to high culture (it is On First Looking). It draws attention to the fact that he could not read Homer in the original Greek. It mistakes Balboa…for Cortez, and so undermines its air of learning.’ For Keats, properly comprehending classical culture and the power of literature was a personal conquest.

Ars Poetica
And so at the beginning of the twentieth century, English poetry was dominated by a highly rhetorical, very popular poetry exemplified by such writers as Sir Henry Newbolt, William Watson, and Alfred Noyes. The subsequent revolt against their poetry and especially the implications of its popularity led directly to a search for an antidote to the horrors of the popular poem. The antidote was the image and imagist poetry. In terms of Stead's metaphor, the imagist poet sought to distance himself from the audience and shorten the line between himself and reality with the goal of creating pure poetry.

MacLeish' s attempt at an "imagist" poem, "Ars Poetica," was written March 14, 1925, at the beginning of his serious commitment to poetry.

[....]

"Ars Poetica" has been a part of our "literary lives" for so long that it has blurred in our memory, vaguely associated with other "imagist" poems and modernist manifestos. Yet in spite of the fact that we have encountered it innumerable times in innumerable anthologies, essays, textbooks, that telling last couplet remains fresh and enigmatic: "A poem should not mean / But be." But what can one say about its particulars? And what is its significance?

"Ars Poetica," John Cage suggests, is the best piece of propaganda the imagist movement ever had. It is not an imagist poem, he says, because, first, it is almost impossible to write one, and second, it is too didactic; there is too strong a message. To this insightful remark I would add another: Scott Donaldson writes in his biography of MacLeish that "in severely compressed form," "Ars Poetica" conveys "some of the modernist aesthetic" (150). This remark comes about after Donaldson has pointed to a gloss on the poem that MacLeish wrote to Norman Holes Pearson in 1937, in which MacLeish used his notebooks to refresh his memory on his thinking at the time of the writing of the poem. Donaldson writes:

There he [MacLeish] found Fenellosa's observation that "metaphor was the very essence of poetry," but not as exegesis or demonstration. Metaphor itself was "experience." In his notebooks, too, was his reworking of Eliot's doctrine of the "objective correlative," a concrete representation that would convey emotion without involving the abstract slither of the merely personal. It would not do to gush on the page. The object of a poem was "not to recreate" the poet's emotion in someone else. . . . The poem itself is finality, an end, a creation." (150)

Outlined here are four important aspects of the modernist aesthetic. Donaldson' s astute statement of the importance of metaphor identifies this trope not as exegesis or demonstration, but experience itself. Second, he isolates the concrete as a representation of the emotion, that is, the objective correlative. Third, he insists upon the avoidance of the merely personal, the escape into the impersonal. And fourth, he understands the poem as a creation that is an end to itself. Perhaps what was buried in "Ars Poetica" in 1925, but uncovered by MacLeish himself in the letter of 1937 is what has drawn us to the poem all these years: metaphor, concretion, non-intervention, the concept of impersonality, and autotelism.

In a discussion of Williams's theory of "no ideas but in things" and MacLeish's "Ars Poetica," Howard Nemerov observed that

One of the hardest things about studying Modern Poetry is that you can write a far more coherent and plausible account from what the poets said they were doing than from their poems. This difficulty is compounded when the poems keep talking about themselves and their intentions for poetry as a whole. (154-55)

"Ars Poetica" does not do what it says should be done in the composition of a poem—largely because it is impossible to write a poem that is and only is an object to behold as a static object without meaning, without message. This is the central paradox of "Ars Poetica."

Sonnet 130
 William ShakespeareSonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
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Of the 154 sonnets that Shakespeare wrote throughout his lifetime, 126 were written to a figure known as the Fair Youth. The remaining 28 poems were written to the Dark Lady, an unknown figure in Shakespeare’s life who was only characterized throughout the poem by her dark skin and hair. The difference between the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady sonnets is not merely in address, but also in tone: while the Fair Youth sequence use mostly romantic and tender words, the Dark Lady sonnets are characterized by their overt references to sex and bawdiness. Scholars have attempted to illustrate the difference of tone between them by stating that the Fair Youth sequence refers to spiritual love, while the Dark Lady sequence refers to sexual passion. There have been a number of attempts to identify the Dark Lady, however none have some to fruition.



Sonnet 130 Summary
Sonnet 130 satirizes the tradition – stemming from Greek and Roman literature – of praising the beauty of one’s affection by comparing it to beautiful things, typically in a hyperbolic manner. For example, it was not uncommon to read love poems that compared a woman to a river, or the sun. Therefore, the imagery used throughout the poem would have been recognizable to contemporary readers of the Sonnet because it was playing with an established tradition that contemporary poets would have made use of quite frequently, so far as to lead it to become cliché.

It is written in iambic pentameter, with a rhyming couplet at the end.



Sonnet 130 Analysis
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

The poetic speaker opens the poem with a scathing remark on his beloved’s eyes: they are ‘nothing like the sun‘. As per Elizabethan tradition, such a comparison would have been almost expected, however the poetic speaker continues to deride his beloved’s appearance by slashing any attempt to match her to things found in nature. If snow is white, her skin is not – dun is another word for grey-brown; her hair is described as black wires, and she does not have a pleasant flush to her cheeks. He goes so far as to condemn the smell of her, and the sound of her voice.

The idea behind the Elizabethan tradition of love poetry was to elevate one’s love to a near unachievable plane; to make a mortal woman read in such a manner that she became elevated to near goddess status. The poetic speaker, rather than elevate her, brings her further down to earth. As he continues to write, he admits that he has never seen a goddess go, but his mistress walks on the ground. That line in particular seems almost openly satirizing the tradition itself, as it is well known that many Elizabethan poets would compare their lovers to things that mortals could not achieve, leaving the realm of human to enter the pantheon of the gods.

Despite her shortcomings, the poet insists that he loves her, not because she is a goddess, not because she is an unattainable beauty, but because she is his, and because she is real. He loves her for what the reality is, and not because he can compare her to beautiful things.

Usually, most Elizabethan love poetry was written in the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet. Contemporary poets, such as Sidney and Watson, would use the Petrarchan sonnet for its poetic form, whereas in Sonnet 130, Shakespeare mocks all the conventions of it.

Other scholars have attempted to push forward the idea that the poem is ultimately a romantic one in nature. They point out that Elizabethan love poetry tended to emphasize and praise people for qualities that they could not, or would not, have possible been able to possess, whereas this, through mentioning all the mistress’ qualities, is actually complimenting her. It is quite a stretch to reach this conclusion, and it is not the popular interpretation of the poem, however an argument can be made that the poetic speaker spends an inordinate amount of time describing his mistress down to the bare bones. The lines he spends on her description could very well symbolize his true adoration for the mistress, and her looks. By contrast, poets who compare their lovers to nature are not really describing them as they are, but idealizing them – and therefore, the poet seems to hint, they cannot love their beloved as much as he loves his mistress.

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
The central theme of "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" by Adrienne Rich is how the power of the patriarchy controls women's bodies but not their minds. The poem makes this point by presenting the wild, exotic, powerful tigers embroidered by Aunt Jennifer and contrasting them with Aunt Jennifer herself. CONTINUE READING
The first stanza of the poem characterizes the tigers as "topaz denizens of a world of green" who do not fear men and pace in "certainty" around their idealized world. The bright color words and confident verbs in the stanza are redolent of self-assured power. The second stanza shifts to Aunt Jennifer, who is embroidering this vivid picture on a screen. She does not seem powerful at all. Her fingers are "fluttering" through the wool, and she can barely pull the tiny needle because the "massive weight of Uncle's wedding band / Sits heavily on Aunt Jennifer's hand." This image evokes something like a prisoner's ball and chain, and very clearly symbolizes the dominating power of patriarchal institutions, such as marriage. The last stanza envisions the future. There is no hope for Aunt Jennifer: her bondage lasts until her death, when her "terrified hands" lie in a coffin, still dominated by men. Her tigers, however, remain unafraid on the screen she made. Although her body has died, still "mastered by" her ordeals, the tigers, the denizens of her imagination, persist, regal and powerful. This is a feminist twist on the classic theme of art's ability to outlast human life.

Holy Sonnets 10
In John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 10," the poet expresses hope to those who fear death and the threat it holds on mankind. In this sonnet, he personifies Death and tells it that it has no reason to be proud because, although it is dreaded by many, it does not have any permanent power or hold. CONTINUE READING
The poet tells Death that even those it thinks it has destroyed have not died for eternity, and it has no power to kill him either. The sonnet compares what happens in death to "rest and sleep." He acknowledges that, although everyone does experience it at some time, death is, in reality, a slave itself to illnesses and accidents. It has no choice or say in whom it takes. Donne ends the sonnet by telling Death in the last two lines that after a brief time of sleep, "we wake eternally, and Death shall be no more." He then pronounces a final death sentence upon Death itself, for Death is sure to be destroyed once and for all.
This sonnet, written in the first decade of the 1600s, was part of a group of 19 sonnets. It is also known by its first few words, "Death be not proud." John Donne was a preacher as well as a poet, and this sonnet expresses his hope in his faith.

The Human Abstract
The speaker argues that pity could not exist unless there was poverty and inequality to excite it. Mercy would not be necessary if everyone was enabled to be happy. Peace is simply the result of fear, which prevents open dispute, until the development of selfishness overcomes it. Selfish love leads to cruelty, the desire to hurt, control and trap others. It does so by colluding with ‘holy fears' – such as fear of offending God – and tears of repentance or sorrow for offending God.

These tears water the ground, allowing the tree of humility to develop. This grows into a tree whose foliage is that of mystery. This foliage provides food for both caterpillar and fly. It produces the sweet fruit of deceit or lies. The raven (a bird linked with death) finds its nesting place in it. No gods have ever discovered the tree because it grows in the human mind.

Commentary

The Human Abstract is a symbolic analogy of how the human mind is the agent of its own downfall. This poem analyses the virtues - Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love - that constituted both God and humanity in The Divine Image in the Songs of Innocence.

This poem asserts that the traditional Christian virtues of mercy and pity presuppose a world of poverty and human suffering. By implication, if this is humankind's understanding of God, then he, too, seems to desire or accept such poverty and suffering.

Virtue as a human construct

These virtues represent a kind of passive and resigned sympathy which is blind to the fact that they, in fact, feed off the unjust situations so-called virtuous people create!

People like to experience pity for others and therefore may feel virtuous in giving a donation to the poor. However, few wish to change their way of life to ensure that no-one is poor
Mercy flatters individuals, because they can condescend to those more miserable than them, but it does not inspire them to raise others to their own level of contentment
Peace is similarly self-serving, arising not from love of others but from fear of what they might do otherwise
Meanwhile, love is expressed out of concern for the self rather than for others.
By speaking and thinking in abstract concepts, Blake illustrates how people are able to deceive themselves concerning the true motives for their conduct. It is a way of avoiding the world humanity has created. The poem's title suggests humankind has produced an image of human nature made up of abstract concepts, which actually flatter and conceal the truth about it.

Religion as a human construct

According to Blake, such abstract ideas are at the root of what he observes of contemporary religious practice. For Blake, the whole religious ‘system' issues from self-centred love, which breeds a cruel desire to control and repress human powers.

Blake then uses an allusion to a tree. In the Bible, Jesus describes the kingdom of God as being like a strong plant which develops from the seed of faith. It is an image of freedom and life – all the birds find shelter in its capacious branches Mark 4:30-32. However, the tree described in the poem represents the system of religion devised by the human brain. It is an image of oppression and death:

According to Blake, the mind which has fallen into selfish love begins to develop ideas of God as one to be feared, a God ‘out there' who is ruler, judge and potential tyrant
Fear leads to tears of repentance for causing offence to this ruler, thus keeping the mind in subjection to ‘God'
This gives rise to humility. Rather than the positive association usually given to this, Blake saw humility as an undervaluing of human powers and their capacity to be indwelt by God. He held that humility meant believing oneself to be nothing in comparison to this external authority figure
The more such humility grows, the more incomprehensible and divorced from human beings the human idea of God becomes
This develops into ‘Mystery' – the belief that humankind is living under a system unfathomable to the mortal mind. According to this perspective, individuals are, therefore, subject to powers beyond themselves
This leads to more pernicious beliefs, symbolised by caterpillars and flies which are destructive or disease-bearing
The final result is the ‘fruit' of deceit, the religious system which, to Blake, was a web of lies about the true nature of reality
Unlike the biblical image, the human grown tree in the poem shelters, in its deepest shade, spiritual death, represented by the raven.
Humanity imprisoned by itself

Implicit in the poem is a critique of the way in which people have developed ‘mind-forg'd manacles'. These are systems of thought which have led to the construction of oppressive social structures. Chief among them is the Church, and its authority as the guardian of ‘mystery'. Also included is the monarchical state, underpinned by Church authority. This adds to the image of a regal, hierarchical and controlling God.

So Blake suggests here that the origins for social ills are, in fact, to be found within human beings who have fallen into divided selfhood. They have created a ‘God' and a social order in their own image.

The Nurse's Song
The green - Blake's symbolic village green has three, inter-linked aspects:

The colour green is associated with growth, fertility and spring
Village greens were places of play and freedom. They represented the importance of play and, therefore, of imagination in human life.
Village greens were not owned by anyone. They were common land. They, therefore, represented another kind of freedom - freedom from the rule or demands of a landowner or authority figure. They were the opposite of ‘chartered' towns which were under the authority of its officials.
Using this image emphasises the freedom and play which is at the centre of this poem and suggests, too, the inner freedom of the nurse. She seems in harmony with all that is growing and playful.

NurseThe Nurse - The image of the nurse is used to represent the caring and nurturing capacity within human beings. This can be used to protect the freedom of what is carefree, innocent and vulnerable. When this is so, the nurse or care-giver delights in their charge and has no desire to repress or rule. But this capacity can also be distorted into a desire to control what is carefree and vulnerable.

Fading light - Unlike The Ecchoing Green, the darkness appears much earlier in Nurse's Song. The children focus only on making the most of the daylight. However, the nurse is aware of the threat that lurks in darkness (‘the dews of night arise' seems unhealthy) and the need to be responsible in terms of the day to come. That the children desire to play as the light fades could symbolise their developing maturity and fading innocence. The Nurse's acquiescence can be variously interpreted as:

A wise realisation that the children need to learn to cope in the dark
Permission to play as long as possible is a way of extending her charges' innocence given the inevitability of darkness / experience
Her continuing pastoral care
An abdication of responsibility.
Investigating imagery and symbolism

In what ways do the associations with green reinforce the emphasis on growth and freedom in the children's play and nurse's response?
How do you interpret the Nurse's response in the final stanza?
In the light of this, how ‘dark' do you feel your reading of the poem should be?
Themes

The nature of authority

A central theme in Nurse's Song is the nature of authority and leadership, related to the theme of parental care. This nurse is someone who is with, but not in charge of, her children. Her care does not repress or restrict them; she responds to their needs for freedom and enjoys their capacity for play.

Childhood innocence

A secondary theme is the nature of childhood innocence. There is a positive representation of unselfconscious delight in freedom and play, suggesting the life of the imagination. However, the gathering gloom threatens to curtail innocent activities.

The Divine Image
The speaker states that all people pray to Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love in times of distress and then thank them for blessings. When humans pray to ‘God, our father dear' it is these qualities of heart they are praying to and thanking. These are also, however, the characteristics of humanity. Therefore, all prayers to Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are directed not just to God but to ‘the human form divine,' which should be regarded with love and respect by all people, regardless of their religion or culture.

This poem follows A Cradle Song, which has considered the idea of God becoming one with human beings through a recognisable human situation. It takes up the same theme from a different angle, asking readers to question what is meant by the idea that human beings are reflections of God.

Commentary

Praising God and humankind

The speaker praises both God and humanity and asserts an identity between the two. The poem seems to emphasize that the qualities of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are precisely what people are thinking of when they speak of God. It also suggests that there are only gentle qualities in ‘God, our father dear'; there is no wrath, fierce energy or anything suggesting power or mightiness. In this way, many of the elements seen in the natural world seem excluded from the picture of God. It is as if the God depicted in The Divine Image is the father of lambs but not the father of tigers (See The Lamb and The Tyger)

God within humankind

Blake believed that ‘all deities reside in the human breast', and that God primarily dwells within humanity, rather than as a force beyond and above it. Hence Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are also equivalent to humanity. All that can be known of God is found within human beings. Therefore:

Humans are worthy of reverence
They have a basic equality which provides the basis for a universal human brotherhood.
An incomplete view

Because this poem represents some of Blake's beliefs about the indwelling of God and consequent universal brotherhood, it is tempting to interpret it simply as a statement of Blake's belief. The phrase ‘all must love' can be interpreted as a declaration about how humans are bound to love the human form, as much as an imperative that they should.

However:

According to Blake, any view of God, and consequently of humanity, is partial
Perhaps pity and mercy would not be necessary in a world in which everyone was truly treated as divine and as a brother or sister. This is what Blake suggests in the companion Song of Experience, The Human Abstract
The viewpoint of innocence, whilst not untrue, is not a complete vision of life.

What Is Life?
While this is indeed a short poem, there is a lot of contemplation going on regarding the essence of life. Coleridge appears to be considering that life itself is consciousness, or enlightenment. Our perception and ability to interact with our world is dependent upon our conscious mind. Without consciousness, life would be meaningless.

The most interesting aspect of this poem for me is the tension caused by the use of opposites; for example, light and darkness, pain and joy, life and death.  It is almost a representation of the opposing cosmic forces that hold existence together in balance. Think yin and yang. I myself have learned from experience that life is a constant struggle between opposites; for me it is often logic against emotion, or the spiritual against the material. This struggle is embodied by the archetypal image to which Coleridge alludes at the end of the poem, that of Jacob wrestling with the angel.

JacobAndAngelThe biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel is symbolic of man’s struggle with God. Jacob is essentially struggling to come to terms with the divine aspect of himself. Coleridge appears to be having the same internal struggle, trying to make sense of life’s meaning. Is he just a temporary vessel for “an absolute self,” or is there more to his existence? Is there an even deeper meaning that has yet to be illuminated by human consciousness?

I found this poem oddly comforting. It is good to know that I am not the only person plagued with these questions.

Nature Is What We See
Dickinson holds nature up to her powerfully inquisitive imagination, and yields some insightful definitions.
In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams would investigate “Nature”, among other words, as one of the most complicated words in the English language, looking to chip away at our standardized, conventional understanding of it. Dickinson will do the same in this poem, albeit more concisely, moving from our immediate senses to our sapient ones.
Just like poetry, Nature is indefinable (Check out E.D.’s definition).

First, she describes it as perception, something simple, but then it becomes more complicated as she becomes more descriptive of what it is.

“Nay” is another way of saying “no.” It’s more of a “no” with a reason; implying betterment.

Emily evolves the idea of Nature from something just seen compared to something amazing and unknown.
There is of course some irony in this statement, as Dickinson is crafting something “to say” about nature in this very poem. To claim we have “no art” to truly describe the natural world, though, is just to say that our efforts will always be incomplete especially in comparison with the perfect “Harmony” of Nature. Dickinson does acknowledge that each of us possesses the knowledge of Nature, even if we cannot fully express it.
Dickinson agrees with most of the Romanticists and modern religious people in that man’s wisdom is foolishness to Nature (or God). Science still cannot make a tree from nothing.