Before in Poetry: Ere Meaning and Crossword Answer
Three blank squares can hold up a whole corner of a crossword. When the clue reads “before in poetry,” the answer is ERE, a word poets have used in place of “before” for more than a thousand years. Hamlet reaches for it when he scorns how quickly his mother remarried, and the same three letters […]
How to Write a Diamante Poem: 7 Lines, Step by Step
You can write a complete poem in sixteen words, using nothing more than the grammar you learned in school. Here is how to write a diamante poem: Build seven unrhymed lines in a 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 word pattern, with one noun, two adjectives, three -ing verbs, four nouns, three more -ing verbs, two adjectives, and a final […]
The House by the Side of the Road: Full Poem and Meaning
You pass strangers every day, and each time you quietly choose between looking up and looking away. Sam Walter Foss built a whole poem around that choice:“The House by the Side of the Road,” first published in 1897, in which a speaker asks to live beside the highway of life so he can “be a […]
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda: Poem, Full Text and Meaning
A gift of socks rarely starts an argument about beauty, yet one pair was lovely enough to make a Nobel Prize winner hesitate before wearing it. That hesitation became “Ode to My Socks” (Oda a los calcetines in Spanish), the 1956 poem in which Chilean poet Pablo Neruda turns hand-knitted wool socks into animals, weapons […]
To Autumn by John Keats: Read the Complete Poem Text
On a Sunday in September 1819, John Keats walked past the edge of Winchester, saw a field of cut stubble, and decided it looked warm. He went home and wrote one of the quietest poems in English, and he died less than a year and a half later. “To Autumn” has no “I” in it, […]
After Apple Picking by Robert Frost: Full Text of the Poem
Frost’s speaker has stopped climbing, but the ladder has not let go of him: His foot still aches from the rungs, and every apple he picks keeps rolling through his head. That strange hour between finishing work and falling asleep is the whole setting of Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” a 42-line poem first published in […]