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William Cowper (/ ˈ k uː p ər / KOO-pər; 15 November 1731 [2] / 26 November 1731 – 14 April 1800 [2] / 25 April 1800 ()) was an English poet and Anglican hymnwriter.. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside.
After a "weary time", the ship encounters a ghostly hulk. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death", a deathly pale woman, who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable.
St Erkenwald is a fourteenth-century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s. [1] [2] It has sometimes been attributed, owing to the Cheshire/Shropshire [3] /Staffordshire Dialect in which it is written, to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Lucy Gray is generally not included with Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, [4] even though it is a poem that mentions a character named Lucy. [3] The poem is excluded from the series because the traditional "Lucy" poems are uncertain about the age of Lucy and her actual relationship with the narrator, and Lucy Gray provides exact details on both. [5]
The poem was created as part of a friendly competition in which Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith each created a poem on the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II under the title of Ozymandias, the Greek name for the pharaoh. Shelley's poem explores the ravages of time and the oblivion to which the legacies of even the greatest are subject.
The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from the Iliad.Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.
Book IV, the last Propertius wrote, has only half the number of poems as Book I. Given the change in direction apparent in his poetry, scholars assume only his death a short time after publication prevented him from further exploration; the collection may in fact have been published posthumously.
In 1635 he retired to his estates in obedience to an order of 20 June 1632 enforced by the Star Chamber against absentee landlordism, and employed his time in literary pursuits. In 1637 "A Sessions of the Poets" was circulated in manuscript, and about the same time he wrote a tract on Socinianism: An Account of Religion by Reason (printed 1646 ...