British Literature

“O What Is That Sound” by W.H. Auden and “Between the Wars” by Billy Bragg each display a perspective on the post and the pre-war era of the 1930s. These texts present a worthwhile pairing because they each work to share the viewpoint of an individual living through a period of anxiety and uncertainty—plagued…

 Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” and Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” both portray idyllic female subjects described by a third-person speaker. Each poem incorporates themes of temptation, lust, a woman’s position in society, and male domination. A striking yet perplexing similarity between these two works is that both of the female subjects die by…

The poems “Peace” by Rupert Brooke and “On Receiving News of the War” by Isaac Rosenberg take diverging approaches to discussing the developing conflict of the time that was WWI. Brooke’s outlook is influenced by his undeniably nationalistic perspective and his naivete. Through his poem “Peace,” Brooke encapsulates an unafflicted innocence that will remain…

Themes of childhood innocence and a childlike perspective on the world are explored by both William Wordsworth and William Blake in their poetry, particularly in the poems “We Are Seven” by Wordsworth and “The Little Black Boy” by Blake. Each of these works examines a different frame of reference from which a child confronts…