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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 21.
- Dickinson's spring poem ends by paying its workers with a coffin standIn eight lines, Emily Dickinson announces spring like a posted bulletin, tells her heart to down tools and sit somewhere rosy, and then pulls the rug away. The wages for even the …
- Emily Dickinson argued in four lines that silent feelings outshine happy wordsEmily Dickinson's shortest arguments can be her sharpest. In a poem of just four lines and fifteen words, she ranks the chatter of happy people as cheap music and gives the prize …
- Dickinson compared being forced into prose to locking a bird in the poundAs a girl, Emily Dickinson's speaker was shut in a closet because the adults wanted her quiet. Grown up, she finds the same people trying to confine her to prose. Her reply is gle…
- Emily Dickinson's six-line creed: God does not light a fire to snuff itIn just six lines Emily Dickinson makes a compact case for faith. A calm ocean is still an ocean, she says, however quietly it lies. And a God who lit this dwelling would not be s…
- Keats found a wild musk-rose perfect, until a friend's bouquet beat itJohn Keats wrote a sonnet to thank a friend named Wells for a gift of roses. Before he gets to the thank-you, he describes the loveliest wild flower he ever met, a musk-rose grace…
- Keats's To Autumn moves from ripening fruit to a sky full of swallowsKeats's To Autumn travels through a whole season in three stanzas. It starts with fruit swelling on the branch, pauses on a drowsy figure sprawled across a granary floor, and ends…
- Keats praised blind Homer for seeing three worlds at onceIn his sonnet To Homer, John Keats casts himself as someone stuck on a beach, hearing rumours of Greek islands he can never reach. Homer, by contrast, was blind, yet the gods tore…
- Tennyson could slip into a trance just by repeating his own nameFrom boyhood, Alfred Tennyson reported a strange waking state brought on by saying his own name over and over, until his sense of self seemed to melt away. William James later cit…
- The poet behind In the Bleak Midwinter turned down three marriage proposalsEvery Christmas, choirs sing words by Christina Rossetti, who also wrote the eerie Goblin Market. She posed as the Virgin Mary for her brother Dante Gabriel's first finished oil p…
- Elizabeth Barrett wrote a Homeric epic at fourteen and her father printed itBy her own account she read novels at six, fell for Pope's Homer at eight, started Greek at ten and finished an epic called The Battle of Marathon at fourteen. Her father had it p…
- Gerard Manley Hopkins burned his poems and stayed silent for seven yearsIn May 1868, days after resolving to enter religious life, a young Oxford graduate built a bonfire of his own verse and almost stopped writing. He broke the silence only when a Je…
- In Keats's Endymion, a lonely maiden tries to escape sorrow and ends up embracing itA girl weeps alone beneath palm trees until a roaring procession sweeps her up: Bacchus, god of wine, with satyrs, tigers, elephants and alligators ferrying laughing infants. She …
- Dickinson saw late summer as a book whose unread pages are running outEmily Dickinson compares the end of summer to a reader who notices, with reluctance, that the finished pages now outweigh the ones still to come. Autumn is only hinted at through …
- For Dickinson, the absent dead felt further off than Heaven itselfIn this poem Emily Dickinson thinks about people who are gone and calls them more remote than Heaven: Heaven is the root, they are seed that has blown away. They cannot speak, arg…
- Emily Dickinson's six-line butterfly can survive the sun but not the heatIn six lines, Emily Dickinson dresses a butterfly in a gown scorched with dark spots, declares it safe from the Sun, and then shows it folding its wings and slumping onto a clover…
- A Dickinson speaker remembers both her first day alive and her lastEmily Dickinson gives us a narrator who can recall the first day she was a life and also the last. Both were still, she says, but the final one was stiller, and empty where the fi…
- In Dickinson's spring flood, the soul stops missing dry landEmily Dickinson pictures spring as a flood that washes away the house but leaves the water intact. The soul, cast adrift, gropes at first for a shoreline. Then it adjusts, and by …
- Dickinson claimed one human heart outweighs infinity, in only eight linesEmily Dickinson opens by admitting that life is great and the afterlife greater, since it is infinite. Then she flips the scale: once every space and every kingdom has been displa…
- Emily Dickinson wrote a lost-property notice for an entire worldEmily Dickinson frames a huge loss as a small ad: she mislaid a World the other day, and has anyone found it? It is easy to identify, she adds, by the ring of stars around its for…
- Keats envied a winter tree because it cannot remember summerIn this lyric John Keats calls a bare December tree and an icy brook too happy, happy, because neither remembers the warmth it has lost. People are not so lucky. The final stanza …
- A wedding procession that turns out to be a funeral, in Dickinson's handsCarriages line up, guests gather, relatives kneel to kiss a lovely forehead. Emily Dickinson stages every sign of a bride leaving home, then tells us she went "the Darker Way". An…
- Dickinson pictures the dandy, the critic and the atheist betting everything on nowIn eight lines, Emily Dickinson lines up three unlikely companions, the Fop, the Carp and the Atheist, and shows them staking their whole fortune on the thin edge of a single mome…
- Losing someone who never left the room: Dickinson on love going coldNobody dies and nobody departs in this Emily Dickinson poem. The beloved is still right there, yet distance has crept onto her face and into her voice. The world looks unchanged, …
- A lover frozen a breath from a kiss, forever, on a Greek vaseKeats stares at an ancient urn and finds its painted figures luckier than any living person. A piper plays silent tunes that never tire, trees never drop their leaves, and a young…
- Keats turned autumn into a drowsy farmhand dozing among the poppiesKeats's ode never mourns the end of summer. Autumn conspires with the sun to crack hazelnuts open with sweetness, dozes on a half-cut field drugged by poppy fumes, and watches cid…
- How reading a translation made young Keats feel like an astronomer spotting a planetKeats had long heard of Homer's kingdom but could never breathe its air, until a translation by George Chapman spoke to him loud and clear. His sonnet compares the thrill to an as…
- Shakespeare's twelve-line song claims music can make mountains bow and grief dieTrees bend, frozen peaks lower their heads, flowers spring up as if summer had moved in for good, and even ocean waves lie down to listen. Shakespeare's short lyric about Orpheus …
- Emily Dickinson scolds the winter snow for how it treats a fresh graveIn just eight lines, Emily Dickinson turns to the falling snow and gives it an order. Someone new lies under it this winter, resting for the first time in the ground. The speaker …
- In eight lines, Dickinson makes a living speaker measure her own graveEmily Dickinson's speaker was never afraid of dying, except that death would part her from the person she loved. Now life has done the parting instead. So she asks to be handed ba…
- Keats, the poet of urns and nightingales, once wrote a six-line drinking jokeBefore the great odes, John Keats dashed off a tiny comic verse naming three pleasures he wanted without limit: women, wine and snuff. He crowns them his holy trinity, swears by h…
- A patriotic sonnet by Keats that keeps sneaking off to ItalyKeats opens this sonnet by praising England so warmly that he claims he needs no other landscape. Then comes a small word, yet, and the speaker confesses an ache for Italian skies…
- Emily Dickinson describes giving her life away with the snap of a buckleIn sixteen short lines, Emily Dickinson's speaker hears a buckle click shut around her life and walks off like royalty, her future signed over as a duke signs a deed. She still sm…
- Dickinson's six-line case that your own life beats any novelNo romance you can buy, Emily Dickinson argues, grips a person like reading his own individual story. Then she flips the usual idea of fiction: a tale is fiction precisely when it…
- A bare winter tree turns away visitors until its April bonnet arrivesIn just four lines, Emily Dickinson turns a leafless tree into a Victorian lady declining visitors. It sends word that it is not at home to callers, mentions that its new bonnet i…
- Young Keats heard church bells and predicted they would fall silentIn a sonnet about Sunday bells, John Keats does something bold for his time. He calls the summons to prayer gloomy, pities the people who leave fireside music and good conversatio…
- Dickinson gave yesterday four different names in eight short linesYesterday, says Emily Dickinson, is history, then poetry, then philosophy, then mystery. Each label tries to pin the past down and each slips. By the end, while we cleverly specul…
- Pip's secret fortune came from the convict he fed in a graveyardOn Christmas Eve 1812 a seven-year-old orphan steals a pie and a file for a terrified stranger on the Kent marshes. Years later, living as a London gentleman on anonymous money, P…
- Emily Dickinson imagined heaven as a school day with no recessMost hymns promise that paradise will feel like home. Emily Dickinson's speaker flatly refuses: heaven sounds like an endless Sunday where playtime never arrives, watched over by …
- Six lines about the adults who never told a child about deathAs a small girl, Dickinson's speaker notices that people keep vanishing and decides they must have moved somewhere far off and untamed. The truth, that they had died, was kept fro…
- Dickinson stopped praying as a girl, then missed having someone to steady herShe prayed because grown-ups told her to, and quit once she could judge how prayer felt to her. Decades later, in moments of danger, Dickinson's speaker wonders how restful it wou…
- A traveller returns home, touches the latch, and runs away like a thiefAfter years away, Dickinson's speaker stands at her old front door and cannot bring herself to knock. What if a stranger answers and asks her business? She laughs at her own fear,…
- A modest 1798 poetry book quietly launched English RomanticismCritics barely reacted when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Yet the slim volume, written in plain speech about ordinary country people, is now treated …
- What is the mysterious music Dickinson heard filling the air before dawn?Dickinson describes an invisible music wrestling through the crowded air all day and flooding the town before morning. It is not a bird, a brass band, a tambourine or a hymn. She …
- Eight lines on the moment nature closes the season and says noIn one compressed stanza, Emily Dickinson pictures nature as a craftsman who has used up her colours. Any flower missing this year might be repaid next summer, if another summer c…
- Sonnet 2 warns a young beauty that forty winters are laying siegeShakespeare pictures age as an invading army digging trenches across a handsome face. When the beauty is gone and someone asks where it went, pointing to your own sunken eyes will…
- Sonnet 29 goes from envying everyone to pitying kings in one thoughtDown on his luck, the speaker of Sonnet 29 weeps alone, curses his fate and envies other men their looks, friends and talent. Then a single memory of the person he loves lifts him…
- Sonnet 30 treats grief like a debt you keep repayingMemory in Sonnet 30 works like a courtroom and a counting house. The speaker summons old losses to a hearing, then pays for each sorrow again as if the bill were new. Only the fin…
- In Sonnet 31, the beloved becomes a living grave for every lost loveShakespeare's speaker has mourned old friends and lovers as dead. Then he discovers they were never gone: every one of them lives on inside the person he now loves. Sonnet 31 turn…
- Shakespeare predicted his verse would be outclassed, and asked to be kept anywayIn Sonnet 32 the most celebrated writer in English calls his own lines poor and rude, and expects every future pen to beat them. He asks only one favour of the friend who outlives…
- Dickinson imagined two lovers reunited only at the Last JudgmentTwo lovers, separated for a lifetime, finally meet again before God's judgment seat, stripped of their bodies. Dickinson turns the most terrifying scene in Christian imagination i…
- Shakespeare's forest song promises no enemy except the weatherCome and lie under the trees, the singer urges, and whistle along with the birds. Out here the only foes are winter and rough weather. Shakespeare's short song is an invitation to…
- One small flower, Dickinson suggests, can hand back a lost gardenA single bloom is hardly worth noticing, Dickinson's speaker admits, unless it quietly restores a garden that has vanished. From there the poem spirals outward into drunken bees, …
- For Dickinson, home was not a place but a personKashmir or Calvary, honour or disgrace: Dickinson's speaker says none of it matters as long as she can be where the beloved is. Prison becomes contentment and a sentence becomes a…
- Emily Dickinson asked the Moon which phase was best, and it refused bothIn eight compressed lines, Dickinson stages a riddle: full Moon or crescent? The Moon's answer is neither. What we have not yet reached outshines what we hold, and grabbing the pr…
- Shakespeare's winter song is full of frozen milk, red noses and greasy JoanIcicles on the wall, a shepherd blowing on his fingers, milk arriving frozen in the pail. Shakespeare's winter song skips grand imagery for a crowded farmhouse kitchen, where coug…
- A runaway boy and an enslaved man share a raft, and American fiction changesMark Twain let a barely schooled Missouri boy tell his own story in his own dialect, and the result became one of the Great American Novels. Huck Finn drifts down the Mississippi …
- Keats envied a star its constancy, then refused its lonelinessIn fourteen lines John Keats wishes he could be as unchanging as a star, then immediately rejects the star's cold, solitary vigil. What he wants is permanence without distance: to…
- Voltaire answered an earthquake with a comic novel that got bannedAfter the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire could no longer stomach the claim that everything happens for the best. His reply was Candide, a breakneck satire in which a naive young…
- Emily Dickinson's eight-line riddle: what finally kills hope?In just eight short lines, Emily Dickinson argues that hope has no real foundation and would collapse if it ever examined itself. Crushing setbacks only make it start again. The o…
- Dostoevsky's great crime novel started life as a short magazine storyDeep in debt and supporting his late brother's family, Fyodor Dostoevsky pitched a modest tale to a journal whose editor he had publicly quarrelled with. Within months the story h…