weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
A while ago I posted a lengthy grammar article about the conditional sentences in English, and in this post we’ll read a poem by Rudyard Kipling that can be used to illustrate conditional clauses. It has some great vocabulary, too. (Not to mention lofty ideas!) Rudyard and John Kipling Titled “If—”, Kipling wrote this poem …
Last time we had a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson here on the blog, it was his lovely short piece “The Owl”. In this post I’d like to present “Ring Out, Wild Bells”: it’s a classic New Year’s Eve poem, filled with good wishes and hopeful pleas. First published in 1850, it addresses everything from …
Continue reading "A poem for the New Year: “Ring Out, Wild Bells” by Lord Alfred Tennyson"
Alfred Tennyson was a celebrated 19th century English poet whose life and work largely coincided with the reign of Queen Victoria. He was in many ways the embodiment of the Victorian literary tastes and widely recognised as Britain’s leading poet of the time, not the least through being honoured with the title of the Poet …
Think of literary vampires, and everyone’s first association is bound to be Bram Stoker’s Dracula hailing from that dark, mystifying land of Transylvania. Enormously influential as it has been, Dracula had a notable antecedent in the form of an even more ground-breaking, yet lesser known, vampiric antagonist - Carmilla - created by the Irish novelist …
Continue reading "Queer in more ways than one: “Carmilla”, a Gothic literary classic"
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