Open Book

Analyses of four poems about time and change by the midcentury poet Philip Larkin. In “Church Going,” “An Arundel Tomb,” “The Trees,” and “This be the Verse,” there’s a sense of continuity tinged with melancholy: things survive and renew, but always in a compromised form.

Three poems about death, war, suffering, and other cheery 20th-century subjects by the Anglo-internationalist poet Wystan Hugh Auden: the elegy “Funeral Blues,”  and the ekphrastic or descriptive poems “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and “The Shield of Achilles.” 

An introduction to the twentieth century’s most beautiful novel — with a simple plot but an astonishingly complex, even disorienting style. Ten characters spend two ordinary days, ten years apart, at a summer cottage in the western isles of Scotland. But it’s their interior thoughts, impressions, and emotions, rather than exterior events, that carry the narrative forward. Woolf turns tiny details into questions as grand as the nature of love, the habit of art, and (yes) even the meaning of life. 

MEA CULPA: I misquote Shakespeare's Hamlet; it's actually "the trappings [not 'habits'] and the suits of woe" (1.2.86).

Readings and interpretations of four poems by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats: the rustic simplicity of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; the tender regret of “When You Are Old”; the evocative weariness of “Adam’s Curse”;  and the apocalyptic thrill of “The Second Coming.”

The novel of a beautiful young English aristocrat whose painted portrait ages and declines while he himself stays eternally young, exhibiting no outward signs of his inward moral decay. 

Readings and analysis of three poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — “Mariana,” “The Lady of Shalott,” and “Ulysses” — that fall into two categories: the lives of women sequestered from a hostile or indifferent world, and the longing of a man to impose his will on the world. As we learn, all three should beware what they wish for. 

Readings and analysis of two poems, “To Autumn” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” whose sensual richness and beauty counter the antipathies and harsh frigidity of their surrounding worlds. They underscore Keats’s claim that “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.”