Poems and Poets
The source pack contains fifteen public-domain poems. The four Wordsworth poems anchor the unit; the other eleven widen the conversation. Use this table to choose a poem or a pair, then open it in the source pack.
The fifteen poems
| Poem | Poet | Form | Central concern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lines Written in Early Spring | William Wordsworth | Short ballad-like quatrains | Nature's pleasure set against “what man has made of man”. |
| Composed upon Westminster Bridge | William Wordsworth | Petrarchan sonnet | The city seen as a natural, silent, almost sublime body. |
| The World Is Too Much with Us | William Wordsworth | Petrarchan sonnet | “Getting and spending” against a lost openness to nature. |
| I wandered lonely as a cloud | William Wordsworth | Four six-line stanzas | Memory, solitude and the “inward eye”. |
| Kubla Khan | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Fragment; irregular stanzas | Imagination, imperial command and the poem as a “dome in air”. |
| The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Ballad | Guilt, penance and the compulsion to tell the story. |
| Ozymandias | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Sonnet | Empire, time and the irony of a surviving inscription. |
| Ode to the West Wind | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Ode in terza rima | Destruction and regeneration; the poet as prophet. |
| Ode on a Grecian Urn | John Keats | Ode | Art, time, desire and the riddle “Beauty is truth”. |
| Ode to a Nightingale | John Keats | Ode | Mortality, escape and the return of the “sole self”. |
| La Belle Dame sans Merci | John Keats | Ballad | Enchantment, entrapment and the circular return. |
| She Walks in Beauty | Lord Byron | Lyric stanzas | Balance, beauty and the moral life of appearance. |
| London | William Blake | Quatrains | Institutions, suffering and the “mind-forg'd manacles”. |
| The Tyger | William Blake | Quatrains | Creation, terror and the question of the creator. |
| The Lamb | William Blake | Two ten-line stanzas | Innocence, creation and the chain of names. |
Routes into the poems
Nature and the city
Pair Westminster Bridge with London; pair Lines Written in Early Spring with The World Is Too Much with Us. Ask what each poem wants nature to do.
Innocence and experience
Read The Lamb beside The Tyger. Ask whether the same creator can make both, and what that does to the idea of a benevolent nature.
Power and time
Pair Ozymandias with Ode to the West Wind. One poem leaves a ruin; the other asks the wind to scatter the poet's words.
Beauty and mortality
Pair Ode on a Grecian Urn with Ode to a Nightingale. Both pursue permanence; neither arrives without a cost.
Enchantment and form
Pair La Belle Dame sans Merci with Kubla Khan. Both are drawn to a vision that cannot be fully possessed.
Beauty and goodness
Read She Walks in Beauty beside the Blake poems. Byron's balance is social and moral; Blake's innocence is theological and fragile.
The source pack notes that the four Wordsworth poems are the set poems and the other eleven are context poems. This packet treats all fifteen as available for comparison; teachers can narrow the selection.