greykit.poetry — #1860s
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1890
[emily-dickinson]
Because I could not stop for Death—
Death comes as a courteous gentleman who drives the poet past schoolchildren at play, gazing grain, and a house that seems a swelling of the ground, until centuries feel shorter than a single day.
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1865
[walt-whitman]
O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman's elegy for Lincoln as fallen ship's captain — the voyage won and the port in sight, but the Captain lies cold and dead on the deck while the crowds exult on shore.
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1865
[walt-whitman]
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln — the lilac's perennial bloom, the drooping western star, and the hermit thrush singing death's carol in the swamps; the poem that transformed a president's death into a national rite of mourning.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Goblin Market
Laura succumbs to the goblin merchants' enchanted fruit and wastes away; her sister Lizzie braves the goblins to win the antidote and save her — a narrative poem of temptation, sacrifice, and the redemptive bond between sisters.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Remember
Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.
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1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
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1860
[walt-whitman]
I Hear America Singing
Whitman hears the varied carols of America — carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker — each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.