Parnassus Plays is the name given to a group of three satiric comedies produced between 1598 and 1602 by students of St John’s College, Cambridge. It consists of The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The Return from Parnassus, and The Return from Parnassus Or the Scourage of Simony.  The second and third plays are sometimes referred to as Part One and Part…

D.G. Rossetti's poem The Blessed Damozel depicts the intense yearning of two young lovers for each other. They were separated by death. The lady was dead and taken to heaven. But the man lived on the earth below. From heaven, the lady, however, pined for her earthly lover. The young lady stood, leaning on the…

Matthew Arnold, a Victorian intellectual, though known more as a critical celebrity has to his credit some well-reputed poems, including The Scholar Gipsy, Thyrsis and Dover Beach. All those poems bear out his attitude to Victorian life, to its shabbiness and materialistic glosses. They also constitute what is better known as Arnold’s critical thesis that “poetry is at bottom…

...for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (Lines 30-37) These lines…

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey or simply Tintern Abbey is, like William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a sort of poetical autobiography. Of course, this is no total autobiography of the poet’s life and activities. It is rather a poetical record of the poet’s intimate relation with Nature all through his life. From this angle, Tintern Abbey may well…

Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. This is the concluding part of W.B. Yeats’s patriotic poem Easter 1916. After paying his eulogy to the great Irish patriots who stood, fought, and died to liberate their land from the British occupation, the poet here asserts that everything is brought to an utter…

W.B. Yeats was intimately connected with the freedom movement in Ireland, and he was, as such, in close kinship with a number of Irish political leaders. His political interest was patriotic, and his aim was definitely to emancipate his fatherland from servility to British imperialism. Yeats’s poetry includes some poems occasioned by his political interests or…