Showing results for "Shade" in Themes & Styles

The most enduring and popular theme of poems and poets is that of love. Love changes; its rhythms pause and pulse on the tiniest of things and the biggest of thrills. Within its shades all other feelings, all other emotions, gently reside, waiting for their moment. In these 50 poems, the many, many shades of love reveal themselves.

Whilst the notion of the Mystic East and Oriental wisdom was greatly romanticised by the Victorians and others, the shadow of Colonialism has smudged the view. These great cultures are some of humanity’s earliest, their works, their art some of its most daring and most accomplished. In these 50 poems across 50 poets we hope, at least in part, to rebalance our view of this subject. We begin in the 6th century BC and travel with a poet’s words and eyes across India, China, Persia and many other places in between.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including Christina Georgina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Hardy & Dante Gabriel Rossetti find verse and tender words to match the occasion. Their descriptions of nature’s ever-evolving landscape and humanity’s ever-changing lives emblazon the page with the lively ink that shapes us all.

Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night. From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.