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.

Snow by Vijay Nambisan. Vijay Nambisan was a poet, writer, critic and journalist from India writing in English

‘The Way My Mother Speaks’ by Carol Ann Duffy describes a speaker’s developing connection to her mother’s way of speaking.

Maya Angelou's "Alone" is a poem that deals with togetherness by placing emphasis on being alone; quite an irony. It is a lyrical "thinking out loud", a reflection on what it is to be a human and 'out here' in the big wide world.

"‘If—‘ is an inspirational poem that provides advice on how one should live one’s life. The poem takes the reader through various ways in which the reader can rise above adversity that will almost certainly be thrown one’s way at some point."

"The poem depicts a person’s selfless and pure love for another. It is about two choices a boy has given to a girl, whether the girl will forget him or will come to him. He has designed the two alternatives by the way of various fancy consequences which are under stated."

Huntington does not gloss over the tough stuff.  Her choice of words is amazing, capturing the helplessness of the narrators.  In addition to abuse, she writes about sickness, experience stemming from her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. Huntington’s poetry is not meant to soothe.  It does not have flowery visuals or happy scenarios.  The tales she weaves are dark and gritty, but at the same time defiant and inspiring.  The narrators in her poems suffer, but there is strength in their pain.

"In “A Letter,” the word for the police's stamp sounds like the word for an attack or ambush, and so elegantly we have the police raiding the revolutionaries even as they mark their documents. Pritam seems determined in the last stanza to go off the rails of the conceit, with the book suddenly capable of smell."

Although best known as a poet, Daniel Abse worked in the medical field, and was a physician in a chest clinic for over thirty years. He received numerous literary awards and fellowships for his writing. 

The main theme of the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bennet is the inevitability and pain of loss. "One Art" displays the idea of loss while relating it to life changes that are inevitable with the passage of time.