Engl 3311 poetry essay

Some Suggestions for Essay 3

· Two paired poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

(e.g., “Introduction” (441 and 444); “The Lamb,” (441-42) and “The Tyger,” (446-47); “Holy Thursday [1]” (442) and “Holy Thursday [II] (445)

· Two Poems on Rural Life: William Wordsworth’s “Lines” (458-462) and Samuel Tayler Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” (488-89)

· Two Poems on London: William Blake, “London” (448) and William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” (477)

· Two Poems on Art and Life: John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (582-84) and William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (xxx)

· Two Poems Set in the Middle Ages: John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (579-80) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” “The Lady of Shalott”

· Irony in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (643-44) and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” (644-47)

· Two Poems on Spiders: Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (702) and Robert Frost, “Design” (805)

· Two Poems on Learning and Experience: William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” (457-58) and Walt Whitman, “When I Hear the Learn’d Astronomer” (689-xxx)

· Two Poems on Death by Emily Dickinson: “’Because I could not stop for Death—” (726) and “I heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—” (727).

· Poems on Hope and Despair in Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers—” (722) and “There’s a certain Slant of light” (723)

· The Epiphany in Wiliam Butler Yeats: choose two: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (768-69), “Easter 1916” (772-73), “The Second Coming” (774), “Leda and the Swan” (776)

· Madness and Sense: Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (728) and William Butler Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” (780)

· Sleep in Robert Frost: “After Apple Picking” (799-800) and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (803)

· Visionary Experience in Robert Frost’s “Birches” (802-03) and “Acquainted with the Night” (804)

· Two related poems about the African-American Experience or the Identity of an African-American: pick any two poems by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, or Gwendolyn Brooks. The poems can be by the same poet or different poets.

· Men in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” 91145-47) and “Lady Lazarus” (1148-50)