Alfred Lord Tennyson

In Memoriam

Crossing the Bar

Is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam,

who died suddenly in September, 1833. Hallam's death dealt a particularly
harsh blow to the poet. Almost immediately, Tennyson began attempting to
capture his sense of loss and feelings of grief in brief lyrical sketches.
Is a poem focusing on the transience of life and the finality of death. Alfred
Lord Tennyson was eighty years old at the time and was down with a
severe illness, from which he eventually recovered. The illness, however,
made the poet ponder on Death as he himself was very old and nearing his
time. He uses the metaphor of crossing a sand bar to represent death in
this poem.

Prospice

Matthew Arnold
Robert Browning

The Forsaken Merman

Matthew Arnold
It can easily be viewed as one of Browning's most naked declarations. Its
basic message is that he will not falter before death even though its
imminence perverts the journey of life, but instead will march forward
heroically and face it head-on.

It is about the merman of the poem grieves for his human wife, who, after
hearing the church bells at Easter, has abandoned him and their children to
live on land among humans, never to return. The poem is suffused with
feelings of melancholy and loss.

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Song

Remember

Is a very personal telling of the love story of Elizabeth Barrett and the poet
Robert Browning. They are in many ways typically Victorian with their tone
of gloom and sorrow, their almost morbid sensitivity to illness and death,
their great outpouring of feeling as love develops, and the force and
intensity of their passion. 

In the poem Rossetti addresses her beloved and encourages him to

remember her after her death. She asks him to remember her even when
his memory of her begins to fade. Eventually, the narrator gives this person
her permission to forget her gradually.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Elizabeth Barett Browning

Arthur Hugh Clough

William Ernest Henley

Say not the struggle Nought Avaleith

Invictus
This poem  uses a military metaphor to discuss the idea of striving and
labouring. It is is all about the virtue of trying hard and striving to achieve
something.
The poem was written while Henley was in the hospital being treated for
tuberculosis of the bone. Invictus, meaning “unconquerable” or
“undefeated” in Latin was made to show the will to survive in the face of a
severe test. This poem is about courage in the face of death, and holding
on to one’s own dignity despite the indignities life places before us.

The Whistle
To a Waterfowl
Thanatopsis
The Last Leaf
Annabel Lee
The Cask of Amontillado
Benjamin Franklin
William Cullen Bryant

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Edgar Allan Poe