A short and sweet poem to end our first season of Pause For Poetry. Sara Teasdale was a leading female voice in American poetry at the beginning of the 20th Century, won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1917 and saw much critical and popular success.

https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-30442

We're taking a little break over summer but will be back with more poetry very soon in Season 2.

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A sort of elegy written for a flower, this poem uses the image of the dead rose as a reflection of the fragiliy of life. Barrett Browning was an incredibly successful and talented poet who, through her marriage to poet Robert Browning, became very well-known in her lifetime.

https://allpoetry.com/A-Dead-Rose

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Whitman discusses the inevitabilty of death and finds peace in those assurances of the title. A hugely influential figure in American poetry and American culture, Whitman wrote mostly in free verse and much of his work addresses the ideals of humanism. Leaves of Grass, the collection from which Assurances is taken, was revised multiple times by Whitman throughout his life.

https://www.bartleby.com/142/202.html

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A wonderful example of a poem actually about being in love (rather than unrequited love or loss etc.), Rossetti uses the celebration of a birthday to celebrate her love with some glorious natural imagery in the second stanza. Rossetti wrote some incredible poetry - we'll definitely be featuring more soon.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44992/a-birthday

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Keats wrote this poem after his beloved brother George left England for America in 1818. The sonnet uses fantastical imagery of nature which Keats then undermines in the last couplet by implying that they mean little without George there with him to appreciate them. During this time Keats contracted tuberculosis and he died at the age of 25. George went on to outlive his brother for another 20 years and his eight children now have hundreds of descendents in the US. 

https://www.bartleby.com/126/14.html

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The two long stanzas in this poem represent The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden. The sumptuous imagery in this poem seem to celebrate creativity and life, and the clever parallels between the two stanzas heighten the links Yeats is making between the joys and fragility of life. 

https://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_two_trees.html

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Dickinson's work was never published in her lifetime but has come to be appreciated as some of the finest of American poetry. The very grounded initial image of walking a dog by the beach quickly morphs into a fantastical adventure with mermaids, pearls and personifiation of the sea itself. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50976/i-started-early-took-my-dog-656

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... or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment. This poem was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 after a (possibly opium-influenced) dream and was published in 1816. Supposedly Coleridge woke up from his dream with th intention of writing hundreds of lines of poetry but was interrupted by an infamous 'person from Porlock' (Porlock is a small village in Somerset, UK). We'll never know if there really was a person that interrupted Coleridge, but 'Person from Porlock' has since become a term for someone that interrupts an artist's creativity.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan

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