I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.^[d] Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
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!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias is a perfect Petrachan sonnet making brilliant use of the form to underscore its message. The first eight lines (the octet), recounts a tale told by a traveller who has been to ‘an antique land’, quite possibly Egypt. Shelley does not name it to allow the reader to add their own details and relate to it. The whole poem, apart from the first line and two words on the second line, is the traveller’s tale. The second speaker describes all that is left of the statue: its huge legs, and a broken face which has a cruel expression. The traveller praises the sculptor who could reproduce such an expression.
The last six lines (the sestet) include the inscription on the base of the statue, which boasts about the works of the subject of the statue. However, nothing is now to be seen except the desert sands. Shelley structures the poem like this, with the volta (turn) beginning with the line ‘And on the pedestal these words appear’, to introduce the hubris of Ozymandias thinking his city can outlast nature. Alliteration emphasises the vastness of the desert ”boundless and bare’ and ‘lone and level’. Nature has felled everything Ozymandias ever did, because nature is more powerful than people.
This poem is still relevant today, while humans are busy destroying the planet to make money, we are eroding nature, but nature will still hold sway over us, and in the end will destroy all our works. However, if we lose our pride and start to work with nature, we can still prevent destruction of human life.

Photo credit: Dave Topping, Gaia installation, Chester Cathedral 2023.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is written in the concise and intellectually demanding form of the sonnet. The first stanza focuses on the lack of funerals for the men who ‘die like cattle’, drawing on the semantic fields of religious services for the dead, and battle words. These opposing ideas are linked by rhyme, such as ‘orisons’, an archaic word for prayers, being rhymed with guns, in an horrific juxtaposition of the sacred and the obscene. Phonology is used particularly effectively here to show what the men experience, such as the alliteration of ‘rapid rattle’ combined with the onomatopoeia of ‘rattle’. The religious imagery is used to compare the sound of the shells to ‘wailing’, choirs that are ‘shrill and demented’ unlike the soothing harmony choirs are supposed to create. In line 5, the idea that the bells and prayers are mocking mat suggest that even the funerals they cannot have would not be enough to comfort Owen at the loss of a generation of dead. God is mocked, perhaps, in the idea that a funeral service can make it acceptable that these soldiers died. The comfort comes in being remembered, as in the sestet, Owen moves from the scenes of battle to scenes back home, now using the imagery of funerals to link to the tears loved ones shed, linking, for example, the ‘pallor of girls’ brows’ to the ‘pall’ the white cloth over a coffin.  The angry rhetorical questions demand to know why, instead of having a real funeral, these boys only have an obscene mockery of a funeral. The sestet offers some consolation, and the questions stop. Owen links the girls pale brows to the pall, a cloth that is put over a coffin, by using semantically linked words. ‘Pallor’ and ‘pall’ also create a soft mournful alliteration. The candles are the tears in the eyes of mourners. Rituals like flowers, and closing the blinds at night, every day ones, also bring some comfort.

This is a masterly poem. One has only to look at the drafts (available in several places) to realise how hard Owen worked to get the tone just right. His anger turns to sorrow, and thoughts of home.

My heart is like a singing bird

                  Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

                  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

                  That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

                  Because my love is come to me.

‘A Birthday’, is not a birthday greeting, as might first appear. The poet is using the emotions of a birthday so the reader can understand the joy the speaker feels. The poem is on your handout and you may wish to annotate it during my analysis.

At first glance, this poem is an overflow of emotion, but that impression has been carefully crafted. Each stanza is a different list. The first contains a series of joyful images and the second gives instructions for how the lover is to be welcomed. There are two stanzas each with eight lines, which offers balance. The metre is iambic tetrameters – put simply this means that there are four iambic feet in each line. An iamb is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, like your heartbeat. Iambic metre is natural to English speakers; Shakespeare uses it in his plays; ballads and sonnets are usually iambic too.

Over six lines there are three similes, all natural and somewhat unusual. Each occupies the same amount of space, so the pattern is pleasing to the reader, and each even numbered line is indented to carry the reader’s eye to the completion of the image. The even-numbered lines rhyme in full masculine rhymes: shoot/fruit/sea/me, but there is also a lot of assonance and consonance employed to create a pleasing music to each line. For example t and s sounds proliferate throughout, and echo the sounds of the repeated phrase ‘my heart is like’. Assonance, vowel rhyme, such as ‘paddles’ and ‘halcyon’, adds to the music.  Each simile represents something lucky and blest. The singing bird is happy because their nest is in a place where food is plentiful, the tree has plenty of apples to spread its seed, and the rainbow shell is in a peaceful sea where it can flourish. When we look closely at the imagery, we see it is about enjoying an easy life and a good chance of survival. ‘Paddles about’ tells the reader that the sea creature is alive, not an empty shell on a beach. The bird, the tree and the sea creature are all happy, but not as happy as the speaker in the poem. They offer a comparative to help the reader imagine how happy the speaker’s heart is. The bird, the tree and the sea creature are given emotions here, which is an example of pathetic fallacy. This term was coined by John Ruskin. It is a type of personification in which natural objects are given emotions. The repeated phrase ‘my heart is like’ is an anaphora, which holds the structure of the first stanza together, with a variation on the fourth repetition to ‘my heart is’. This  clinches the argument and pulls the three separate images together, because metaphors are stronger than similes.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

                  Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

                  And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

                  In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

                  Is come, my love is come to me.

The anaphora disappears, and instead imperative verbs issue the design blueprint for a marvellous tented raised platform to receive the special guest, her ‘love’. In place of imagery, Rossetti offers a gorgeous description of how she would like this dais to be decorated. Only the most luxurious fabrics are to be used: silk, padded with down.  She chooses rich patterns from heraldry, such as ‘vair’, derived from a mediaeval design made from different colours of fur, and royal fleur-de-lys. Purple is the most expensive dye and therefore royal too. The design of gold and silver grapes and leaves represents a vine, for communion wine, or celebratory wine. Doves represent peace. Pomegranates and peacocks are often associated with everlasting life. The tail feathers of male peacocks look like lots of eyes.  This stanza, like the first, is pulled together in the concluding two lines which reveal why this fine dais is required. The subtle symbolism implies her mystery guest is God. The reader can enjoy the lush description, which is a feast for the senses, no matter where they stand in terms of religion. The whole poem is an extended metaphor about finding God.

These symbols would have been readily to hand for Rossetti, surrounded as she was by art and culture. Her brother Dante Gabriel painted this picture of Proserpine, daughter of Ceres, holding a pomegranate. The fruit has many seeds so often represents abundance, but it is also used widely as a religious motif. There are many references to it in the Bible. In this panel design, we can see the peacock was a much-loved motif used by the Pre-Raphaelites, and the leaf and grape design on the right is by William Morris, a friend of the Rossettis.

I have lived with this poem for a very long time, and perhaps didn’t appreciate its skill in the way it expresses its message, until I had to lecture on it.

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eye
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928

Glossary

mute- silent

meandering – wandering

palings – fences

inurns – buries

nether – underneath

blanched – white

Why I love this poem
Following on from the autumn poem, here is another Hardy one, in a different form. It feels very modern and may surprise some readers. Its only real giveaway is the inclusion of words which have become archaic, so I have provided a glossary.
The perspective in the poem is someone looking out of their window, in the outskirts of a city. The observations are precise and delightful. The repetition of ‘with it’ chime on the ear, and the consonance on the W sound is very pleasing and gentle. Hardy captures the weight of the snow and the way it can bend branches, as well as the silence it brings, because snow muffles sound. The anaphora of ‘Every’ at the start of the opening lines, is broken by a longer sentence broken across two lines, to soften it and create an element of surprise.
It is actually snowing now, and Hardy observes the way the snow falls, and personifies it with the verb ‘grope’. There is also alliteration of the M, another consonant as soft as W. ‘Meeting those meandering’ is a gentle phrase which helps to illustrate how snow falls softly when left to its own devices, without any wind.
Into this still scene, Hardy then brings in some movement, as the watcher sees a robin struggling with the snow as it dislodges lumps when it flies on to the tree to settle.
The bird has attracted a thin black cat, whose colour contrasts with the snow. The steps of the house are white with snow and their definition is lost in the drift, but despite this, the humans take the cat in. Hardy leaves it to the reader to imagine what then happens inside to warm and feed the cat. The viewer has left the window. The poem comes to a comforting conclusion. What might not have been noticed, because of the shifting line lengths, is there is a pattern there. Two lines of two feet yield to two lines of four feet, then those yield to even longer lines of at least 6 feet, then return to medium line lengths. The pattern is subverted later in the poem, with further sets of two feet lines (dimeters) occurring more than once. The rhyme scheme throughout is in couplets, though sometimes these are half rhymes, again giving the element of surprise, for example ‘size’ and ‘eye’ are rhymed Hardy makes sure to start and end the poem with full rhymes, and the pararhymes occupy only the middle. Hardy’s flexibility with form allows the reader to experience the different moods of the snow outside the window, and create a sense of lots to see even though the scene is all but static.
I find this poem spellbinding, yet it is apparently simple and should prove enjoyable and accessible even for readers who fear poetry or think it is too hard for them to understand.

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

John Milton

I first read this poem in an anthology we were given to read at primary school (St. Marie’s, Widnes) when I was in second year juniors (now year 4).  We were allowed to choose poems to learn. This was one I chose and I still love it and know it by heart today. There was no one to tell me that Milton was too hard for an eight year old. This Petrachan sonnet has a strong narrative line, and a subtle rhyme scheme, which made it easy to learn and easy to feel. Patience seemed to be some sort of archangel, who had God’s wisdom at his fingertips. The volte, which I knew nothing about technically, is powerfully present as the blind poet learns to understand that God’s purpose in taking his sight is unknown but he can still fulfil his role. I wasn’t a patient child and this sonnet spoke of patience and learning to see a bigger picture. The dialogue helps to tell the story and it’s a great piece to perform because of the different voices and tonal shifts within it. I love the now archaic lexis: ‘chide’, ‘post’, ‘yoke’ and yet the language is clear and easy to understand. Being a small Catholic child, I had no problems understanding the religious aspect of it, and now I am lapsed and tending towards agnosticism, I think the message still holds good. I love sonnets, the way so much can be packed in to this tight muscular square form which within has such flexibility.