Gatsby X Poetry
The Flea
The speaker tries to seduce his mistress with an extended metaphor: both he and she have been
bitten by the same flea, meaning their separate blood now mingles inside the flea’s body. Having sex
is no different, the speaker argues, and no more dishonourable. His mistress should therefore yield
to him.
Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde
Its speaker describes love as a desperate and violent pursuit, in which a man attempts to hunt down
the woman he loves. This pursuit has failed, so the speaker spends the poem explaining why he is
giving up the hunt.
Sonnet 116
The poem describes true love as an enduring, unbending commitment between people: a bond so
powerful that only death can reshape it. Though the poem is moving and romantic, it risks at times
falling into hyperbole or cliché: some readers may doubt the plausibility—or the sincerity—of its
depiction of love.
To his Coy Mistress
"To His Coy Mistress" is a carpe diem poem: following the example of Roman poets like Horace, it
urges a young woman to enjoy the pleasures of life before death claims her. Indeed, the poem is an
attempt to seduce the titular "coy mistress." In the process, however, the speaker dwells with
grotesque intensity on death itself. Death seems to take over the poem, displacing the speaker's
erotic energy and filling the poem with dread.
The Scrutiny
A witty argument in favour of promiscuity. In a dramatic monologue, the speaker of the poem—a
flirtatious and untrustworthy young man—flits from woman to woman, hoping to taste all the
beauty and pleasure that life can offer him. He justifies his bad behavior with a playful—and
deliberately unconvincing—argument: only by sampling such variety can he ever hope to be true to
one woman.
A Song (Absent from Thee)
This "Song" is witty, mocking, and lewd. In it, a speaker assures his lover that the best way he can
prove his undying love for her is to cheat on her a lot: only through testing out the "torments" of
infidelity can he be truly faithful when he returns to her. Using the shape of a love poem and the
language of religious piety, Rochester satirizes traditional ideas about both love and religion. To this
Restoration-era courtier, it isn't love or God, but lust that makes the world go round.
The Garden of Love
Blake was devoutly religious, but he had some major disagreements with the organized religion of
his day. The poem expresses this, arguing that religion should be about love, freedom, and joy—not
rules and restrictions.
, Song (Ae Fond Kiss)
The poem, which describes two lovers parting, was sent by Burns to a woman he loved just before
she left Scotland, never to see Burns again. The poem has the highly regular structure, meter, and
rhyme scheme of a song lyric, and Burns intended it to be set to the tune of a Scottish folk song.
She Walks in Beauty
The poem praises and seeks to capture a sense of the beauty of a particular woman. The speaker
compares this woman to a lovely night with a clear starry sky, and goes on to convey her beauty as a
harmonious "meeting" between darkness and light. After its discussion of physical attractiveness,
the poem then portrays this outer beauty as representative of inner goodness and virtue.
Remember
A poem about grief, told not from the perspective of a mourner but rather the person who's to be
mourned. In this sonnet, the speaker begs a loved one to remember her after her death—but also
not to feel guilty if he forgets her, so long as she's made some permanent mark on his life and he
remains happy. The speaker's poignant realism (in the sense of accepting that her beloved may in
fact forget about her) engages both with the finality of death and the persistence of love.
The Ruined Maid
Thomas Hardy's bitterly funny critique of Victorian sexual hypocrisy. The poem's speakers are a pair
of former neighbours who find themselves in very different circumstances: there's Amelia, who has
been "ruined" by becoming a rich man's mistress and now lives a life of luxury in the city, and her
unnamed friend, who still toils in the poverty of their rural hometown. Being "ruined," the poem
suggests, is (ironically) a big improvement on a life of impoverished misery. But Victorian double-
standards about women's sexuality means that Amelia's freedom comes at a cost: she may be
wealthier and classier now, but she's forever excluded from respectable society, and reliant for her
position on a man whom society lets off scot-free for his part in this ruination.
At an Inn
Generally thought to be based on Hardy's own life, the poem describes a visit to an inn, during which
the speaker and his female friend are mistaken for lovers—and not just any lovers, but "Love's own
pair!" Looking back on the visit many years later, the speaker laments how he and this woman
seemed in love back then but weren't, and how now they are in love but can't be together due to
distance and the pesky fact that one (or both) of them is already married. The poem casts doubt on
the idealized idea of love, suggesting that actual love is more like an anarchic prankster having fun at
humanity's expense.
La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad
In the poem, a medieval knight recounts a fanciful romp in the countryside with a fairy woman—La
Belle Dame sans Merci, which means "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" in French—that ends in
cold horror. Related to this focus on death and horror, Keats wrote the poem months after his
brother Tom died of tuberculosis.
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae
Song of hopeless longing. In the poem, a languishing speaker laments that, no matter how hard he
tries to distract himself with sex and partying, thoughts of his lost love, Cynara, always intrude on his
