Sunday, January 11, 2026

Elegy: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard

 An elegy is a poem of sorrow or mourning for the dead; also, a reflective poem in a solemn or sorrowful mood.  The adjective ‘elegiac’ is used to describe poetry that exhibits the characteristics of an elegy.

Well-known elegies lamenting the death of a particular person include John Milton's Lycidas (Edward King), P.B. Shelley's Adonais (John Keats), Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam (Arthur H. Hallam), and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Abraham Lincoln). Perhaps the most famous elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is a solemn, meditative poem mourning not the death of a person, but the passing of a way of life. Closely related terms of elegy are monody, threnody, and dirge.

The main characteristics of the

Friday, January 9, 2026

Latin and Foreign Abbreviation and Meaning

 An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase, used to represent the full form. It is a broad term that encompasses acronyms (e.g., NASA, SCUBA) and initialisms (e.g., FBI, CIA), although common usage often uses "abbreviation" to encompass all forms of shortening.

Thursday, January 8, 2026

An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare

 Shakespeare wrote a long sonnet-sequence consisting of 154 pieces. These sonnets were written over a number of years and, though there are several strands to impart to them a unity of sorts, they do not have the kind of continuity which one might expect from a collection which has been called a sequence. These sonnets were written during thé years 1592 and 1597 or 1598; but they were not published until 1609, only seven years before Shakespeare's death. They were not published by Shakespeare himself. The publisher was a man called Thomas Thorpe, a literary-minded man who had previously published a number of famous plays, particularly those written by Ben Jonson and Chapman, and who had also published Marlowe's translation of Lucan. Now, this Thomas Thorpe had obtained the manuscripts of the sonnets from one Mr. W.H. but nobody really knows who this Mr. W.H. was.

Sunday, January 4, 2026

From Petrarch to Shakespeare: The Evolution of the Sonnet

 The literary form of 'sonnet' is a foreign importation in English literature. The sonnet, as a literary form, in fact, appeared in England as one of the distinct and immediate effects of the Renaissance. A sonnet is a fixed poetic form that originated in Italy in the 13th century. The word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, meaning “a little song.” Traditionally, a sonnet consists of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter and follows a strict rhyme scheme. Despite its brevity, the sonnet is capable of expressing deep emotions, complex ideas, and philosophical reflections.

Christina Rossetti's "Echo": A brief description

  Christina Rossetti (1830–1894): Christina Georgina Rossetti was one of the most important Victorian poets of England. She was born on De...