Poetry Daily

A story based on a real dog who still watches over the poet's yard in his own way.

The poet's words : "This poem is very personal to me because it conveys the feelings I felt during high school. I think other teenagers can relate to this because schools nowadays have such high expectations that people can so easily feel like they have disappointed people."

I feel lost by Alexsys

The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

‘Death is Nothing at All’ by Henry Scott Holland speaks thoughtfully about the nature of death. The speaker explains that it’s not a real separation.

The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain. The second, longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the future, but this vision replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a grotesque beast. 

When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been “swinging” them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree’s crest to the ground. He used to do this himself and dreams of going back to those days. He likens birch swinging to getting “away from the earth awhile” and then coming back.

The poem is based on one of Wordsworth's own walks in the countryside of England's Lake District. During this walk, he and his sister encountered a long strip of daffodils.

The focus of much analysis of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” is on the symbolism of the bird trapped in the caged and how it serves as metaphor.A bird in a cage—no matter what its song may sound like—is a creature denied the natural state of freedom. When the poet says that he knows why the caged bird sings and how it feels he is saying that he is privy to this intuition through experience. The experience of denial of the natural state of freedom is not a state of being limited to racial boundaries or the life on artist.