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Poems
| Work | Clues |
|---|---|
| Author and Title | Content |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Quote: "Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink." |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Clues: A wedding guest is pulled aside; a ship is manned by zombies and ghosts; a game of dice between Death and Life-in-Death determines fates; the Mariner is cursed after shooting an albatross with a crossbow. |
| John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn | Quote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." |
| John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn | Quote: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter" |
| John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn | Clues: Addressed as a Sylvan historian and still unravished bride of quietness; features a bold lover who can never kiss, a priest leading a heifer lowing at the skies, and ditties of no tone played to the spirit. |
| William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey | Quote: "Five years have past; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!" |
| William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey | Clues: The full title mentions the Wye River; the poet sits under a dark sycamore and sees wreaths of smoke from hermit caves; he directly addresses his sister Dorothy Wordsworth at the conclusion. |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias | Quote: "I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone...'" |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias | Quote: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias | Clues: Inspired by a statue of Ramesses II; features a shattered visage with a sneer of cold command; notes that the sculptor well those passions read; ends with lone and level sands stretching far away in a bare desert. |
| William Wordsworth - My Heart Leaps Up | Quote: "My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky" |
| William Wordsworth - My Heart Leaps Up | Quote: "The Child is father of the Man" |
| William Wordsworth - My Heart Leaps Up | Clues: Also known as The Rainbow; the speaker wishes his days to be bound to each other by natural piety; heavily associated with Wordsworth's core philosophy regarding childhood innocence and nature. |
| William Blake - The Tyger | Quote: "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright / In the forests of the night" |
| William Blake - The Tyger | Quote: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" |
| William Blake - The Tyger | Clues: Published in Songs of Experience; asks what immortal hand or eye could frame its fearful symmetry; asks if the creator smiled to see his work; notes that the stars threw down their spears. |
| William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud | Quote: "I wander'd lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills" |
| William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud | Quote: "And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils." |
| William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud | Clues: The speaker views ten thousand golden daffodils beside a lake; they outdid the sparkling waves in glee and flash upon the speaker's inward eye, which he calls the bliss of solitude when resting on his couch. |
| John Keats - Endymion | Quote: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" |
| John Keats - Endymion | Clues: An epic poem opening with this line; features a Carian shepherd-prince who falls in love with the moon goddess Cynthia; mentions a bower quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams. |
| John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale | Quote: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" |
| John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale | Clues: The speaker feels a drowsy numbness after drinking hemlock or opium; wishes for a beaker of the true, the blushful Hippocrene; notes the bird's song was heard by the biblical figure Ruth amid the alien corn. |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan | Quote: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree" |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan | Quote: "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man" |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan | Clues: Subtitled A Fragment and composed during an opium dream; mentions a deep romantic chasm, a woman wailing for her demon-lover, and an Abyssinian maid playing a dulcimer. |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - To a Skylark | Quote: "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert" |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - To a Skylark | Clues: The bird is compared to a high-born maiden in a palace tower, a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew, and a poet hidden in thought; the speaker laments that our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught. |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind | Quote: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind | Clues: Written in terza rima; addresses the wind as the breath of Autumn's being and a destroyer and preserver; asks the wind to make the speaker its lyre, scattering dead thoughts like withered leaves. |
| Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty | Quote: "She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies" |
| Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty | Clues: Written about his cousin by marriage, Mrs. Wilmot Horton, who wore a mourning dress with silver spangles; praises the perfect harmony of all that's best of dark and bright in her aspect and eyes. |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses | Quote: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses | Clues: Dramatic monologue spoken by an aging king of Ithaca; calls his people a savage race; explicitly mentions his son Telemachus who will take over; states a desire to sail beyond the sunset and baths of western stars. |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade | Quote: "Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them" |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade | Quote: "Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die" |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade | Quote: "Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred." |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade | Clues: Written about the disastrous Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War; notes that someone had blundered; features a driving, rhythmic meter that mimics horses galloping (dactylic dimeter). |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning - How Do I Love Thee? | Quote: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning - How Do I Love Thee? | Clues: Published in Sonnets from the Portuguese; loves with the passion put into her old griefs and childhood's faith; loves freely, as men strive for Right and purely, as they turn from Praise. |
| William Ernest Henley - Invictus | Quote: "I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul." |
| William Ernest Henley - Invictus | Clues: Written while recovering from multiple amputations due to bone tuberculosis; thanks whatever gods may be for his unconquerable soul; notes that under the bludgeonings of chance his head is bloody, but unbowed. |
| Robert Browning - Rabbi Ben Ezra | Quote: "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be" |
| Robert Browning - Rabbi Ben Ezra | Clues: A philosophical poem featuring a real-life medieval Jewish scholar; utilizes an extended metaphor of God as a master potter and human beings as clay resting on a whirling wheel. |
| Robert Browning - My Last Duchess | Quote: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive." |
| Robert Browning - My Last Duchess | Clues: Set in Ferrara; Duke shows off a portrait of his late wife by Fra Pandolf; complains she was too soon made glad and valued a bough of cherries as much as his name; features a bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse. |
| Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach | Quote: "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" |
| Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach | Quote: "Where ignorant armies clash by night." |
| Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach | Clues: Begins with a calm sea; waves create a grating roar bringing an eternal note of sadness; notes Sophocles heard it on the Aegean; laments the retreat of the Sea of Faith. |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam A.H.H. | Quote: "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam A.H.H. | Quote: "Nature, red in tooth and claw" |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam A.H.H. | Clues: Massive elegy written over 17 years for college friend Arthur Henry Hallam; struggles with Victorian scientific ideas of evolution and fossil records; notes man trusted God was love despite a ruthless nature. |
| Emily Dickinson - Because I Could Not Stop For Death | Quote: "Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me—" |
| Emily Dickinson - Because I Could Not Stop For Death | Clues: Carriage holds the speaker, Death, and Immortality; they pass a school, fields of gazing grain, and the setting sun; speaker wears a gossamer gown and pauses before a house like a swelling of the ground. |
| Walt Whitman - Song of Myself | Quote: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" |
| Walt Whitman - Song of Myself | Quote: "I am large, I contain multitudes." |
| Walt Whitman - Song of Myself | Clues: Core poem of Leaves of Grass; speaker observes a spear of summer grass and visits a harbor where 28 young men swim; helps a runaway slave; ends with the speaker sounding his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. |
| Walt Whitman - O Captain! My Captain! | Quote: "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done" |
| Walt Whitman - O Captain! My Captain! | Clues: A rhyming, traditional poem written on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the captain lies on the deck fallen cold and dead while shores are crowded with cheering crowds and ringing bells. |
| Walt Whitman - When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d | Quote: "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d" |
| Walt Whitman - When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d | Clues: Pastoral elegy for Lincoln; relies on a trinity of core symbols: the lilac with its heart-shaped leaves, a drooping western star, and the solitary song of a hermit thrush singing a carol of death. |
| Emily Dickinson - Hope is the thing with feathers | Quote: "Hope is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul" |
| Emily Dickinson - Hope is the thing with feathers | Quote: "Hope is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul" |
| Emily Dickinson - Hope is the thing with feathers | Clues: Hope as bird singing wordless tune; sweetest in Gale; kept many warm but never asked a crumb of the speaker. |
| Emily Dickinson - I'm Nobody! Who are you? | Quote: "I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?" |
| Emily Dickinson - I'm Nobody! Who are you? | Clues: Speaker warns Don't tell, they'd banish us; public figures like a Frog croaking its name all June to an admiring Bog. |
| Emily Dickinson - Success is counted sweetest | Quote: "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed." |
| Emily Dickinson - Success is counted sweetest | Clues: Nectar requires sorest need; purple Host took flag today but can't define victory clearly like a dying defeated soldier. |
| Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven | Quote: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" |
| Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven | Quote: "Quoth the Raven 'Nevermore.'" |
| Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven | Clues: Mourns Lenore in December; bird perches on bust of Pallas; speaker asks if balm in Gilead; calls bird evil prophet. |
| Edgar Allan Poe - Annabel Lee | Quote: "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea" |
| Edgar Allan Poe - Annabel Lee | Clues: Kingdom by sea; angels coveted pure love; chilling wind froze and killed bride; highborn kinsmen shut her in sepulchre. |
| W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming | Quote: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer" |
| W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming | Quote: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" |
| W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming | Quote: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" |
| W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming | Clues: Post-WWI; best lack conviction, worst have intensity; Spiritus Mundi vision of shape with lion body and man's head. |
| W.B. Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium | Quote: "That is no country for old men." |
| W.B. Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium | Clues: Old man as tattered coat on stick; travels to holy city; asks sages in holy fire for singing-masters; golden bird on bough. |
| T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land | Quote: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land" |
| T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land | Quote: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." |
| T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land | Quote: "Shantih shantih shantih" |
| T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land | Clues: Five sections including Burial of the Dead; Tiresias prophet, Madame Sosostris tarot, Phlebas drowning; Sanskrit ending. |
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | Quote: "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky" |
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | Quote: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" |
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | Quote: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" |
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | Clues: Peach eating, trousers rolled; women talk of Michelangelo; yellow fog rubs back on windows; mermaids singing to each other. |
| T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men | Quote: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." |
| T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men | Clues: Mistah Kurtz epigraph; characters with headpieces filled with straw; distorted nursery rhyme: round the prickly pear. |
| Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night | Quote: "Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day" |
| Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night | Quote: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." |
| Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night | Clues: 19-line villanelle to dying father; wise, good, wild, and grave men react to approaching death. |
| John McCrae - In Flanders Fields | Quote: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row" |
| John McCrae - In Flanders Fields | Clues: WWI poem from dead soldiers' perspective; larks sing amid gunfire; charges living to take up quarrel, hold torch high. |
| W.H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts | Quote: "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters" |
| W.H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts | Clues: Brueghel's Landscape with Fall of Icarus; plowman works, ship sails as boy falls from sky. |
| W.H. Auden - September 1, 1939 | Quote: "We must love one another or die." |
| W.H. Auden - September 1, 1939 | Clues: Fifty-second Street dive bar as WWII begins; blind skyscrapers; Martin Luther; Linz; "low dishonest decade." |
| Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken | Quote: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by" |
| Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken | Clues: Yellow wood; both roads equally lay; predicts telling story with sigh. |
| Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Quote: "Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village though" |
| Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Quote: "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." |
| Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Clues: Chain-rhyme; horse thinks it queer; darkest evening; harness bells shake. |
| Robert Frost - Mending Wall | Quote: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" |
| Robert Frost - Mending Wall | Quote: "Good fences make good neighbors." |
| Robert Frost - Mending Wall | Clues: Repair wall in spring; elves joke; pine trees vs apples; neighbor as old-stone savage. |
| Robert Frost - Fire and Ice | Quote: "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice." |
| Robert Frost - Fire and Ice | Clues: 9-line apocalypse poem; fire = desire; ice = hate; both suffice. |
| Robert Frost - Nothing Gold Can Stay | Quote: "Nothing gold can stay." |
| Robert Frost - Nothing Gold Can Stay | Clues: Nature’s green is gold; leaf subsides to leaf; Eden to grief; dawn to day; Outsiders reference. |
| Langston Hughes - Harlem | Quote: "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" |
| Langston Hughes - Harlem | Quote: "Or does it explode?" |
| Langston Hughes - Harlem | Clues: Dream deferred may sag, fester, crust, or explode; part of Montage of a Dream Deferred. |
| Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Quote: "I've known rivers: / I've known rivers ancient as the world" |
| Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Quote: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." |
| Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Clues: Written at 17; Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi; Black history. |
| Langston Hughes - I, Too | Quote: "I, too, sing America." |
| Langston Hughes - I, Too | Clues: Darker brother sent to kitchen; grows strong; tomorrow none dare deny him. |
| E.E. Cummings - i carry your heart with me | Quote: "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart)" |
| E.E. Cummings - i carry your heart with me | Clues: Lowercase; love as root of root; fear no fate. |
| William Carlos Williams - The Red Wheelbarrow | Quote: "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow" |
| William Carlos Williams - The Red Wheelbarrow | Clues: Imagism; glazed with rainwater; beside white chickens. |
| William Carlos Williams - This Is Just To Say | Quote: "This is just to say / I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox" |
| William Carlos Williams - This Is Just To Say | Clues: Apology note; plums saved for breakfast; delicious, sweet, cold. |
| Allen Ginsberg - Howl | Quote: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" |
| Allen Ginsberg - Howl | Clues: Beat poem; Carl Solomon; Moloch; Brooklyn Bridge; Rockland asylum. |
| Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus | Quote: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well." |
| Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus | Quote: "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." |
| Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus | Clues: Suicide attempts; Nazi imagery; peanut-crunching crowd. |
| Sylvia Plath - Daddy | Quote: "You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe" |
| Sylvia Plath - Daddy | Clues: Father as Nazi; Aryan eye; Panzer-man; "Daddy daddy you bastard I'm through." |
| Maya Angelou - Still I Rise | Quote: "Still, like air, I’ll rise." |
| Maya Angelou - Still I Rise | Clues: Sassiness; resilience; black ocean leaping wide. |
| William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18 | Quote: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate" |
| William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18 | Clues: Rough winds; heaven’s eye; eternal summer; poem gives life. |
| William Shakespeare - Sonnet 116 | Quote: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments" |
| William Shakespeare - Sonnet 116 | Clues: Love as ever-fixed mark; star to wandering bark; not Time’s fool. |
| John Donne - Holy Sonnet 10 | Quote: "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful" |
| John Donne - Holy Sonnet 10 | Quote: "And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." |
| John Donne - Holy Sonnet 10 | Clues: Death not mighty; slave to fate; poppy/charms give better sleep. |
| John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions | Quote: "No man is an island, / Entire of itself" |
| John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions | Quote: "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." |
| John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions | Clues: Illness; mankind interconnected; funeral bells. |
| Andrew Marvell - To His Coy Mistress | Quote: "Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime" |
| Andrew Marvell - To His Coy Mistress | Quote: "But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near" |
| Andrew Marvell - To His Coy Mistress | Clues: Carpe diem; vegetable love; worms try virginity. |
| John Milton - Paradise Lost | Quote: "To justify the ways of God to men." |
| John Milton - Paradise Lost | Quote: "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." |
| John Milton - Paradise Lost | Clues: Epic on Fall; Heavenly Muse; Satan on burning lake. |
| John Milton - When I Consider How My Light is Spent | Quote: "They also serve who only stand and wait." |
| John Milton - When I Consider How My Light is Spent | Clues: Blindness; one talent; Patience explains God needs no work. |
| Robert Herrick - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time | Quote: "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying" |
| Robert Herrick - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time | Clues: Cavalier poem; flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying; sun higher gets closer to setting; urges youth to marry. |
| Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism | Quote: "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" |
| Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism | Quote: "To err is human; to forgive, divine." |
| Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism | Quote: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing" |
| Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism | Clues: Heroic couplets; critic faults; Pierian spring—shallow draughts intoxicate, drinking largely sobers. |
| Pablo Neruda - Poem 20 | Quote: "Tonight I can write the saddest lines." |
| Pablo Neruda - Poem 20 | Quote: "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." |
| Pablo Neruda - Poem 20 | Clues: Twenty Love Poems; remembers lover under endless sky; night wind sings; no longer loves her, but loved her deeply. |
| Stephen Crane - The Black Riders and Other Lines | Quote: "In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial" |
| Stephen Crane - The Black Riders and Other Lines | Quote: "It is bitter, and because it is my heart." |
| Stephen Crane - The Black Riders and Other Lines | Clues: Surreal desert encounter; creature eats its own heart; says it is bitter because it is his. |
| Dante Alighieri - Inferno | Quote: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark" |
| Dante Alighieri - Inferno | Quote: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." |
| Dante Alighieri - Inferno | Clues: Divine Comedy; blocked by leopard, lion, she-wolf; guided by Virgil; gate inscription before entering Hell. |
| Omar Khayyám - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám | Quote: "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on" |
| Omar Khayyám - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám | Clues: FitzGerald translation; A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou; world as chessboard where Destiny plays with pawns. |
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