Christina Rossetti is herself the "monna innominata" of her sequence; the sonnets record her love for Charles Cayley, whom she declined to marry primarily because of a difference in their religious views. In the following translations of the introductory lines from Dante and Petrarch, the quotations from Petrarch are identified by the first lines of the poems in which they appear.

"The day that they have said farewell to their dear friends" (Purgatorio, VIII, 3). "Love, with what great power you conquer me today" ("Io amai sempre et amo forte ancora," 12).

2.1]
"It was already the hour that turns desire homeward" (Purgatorio, VIII, 1). "I go back to the time when I first saw you" ("Vergognando talor ch'ancor si taccia," 3).

3.1]
"O shades, unreal save in outward show!" (Purgatorio, II, 79). "An imagined guide conducts her" ("S'Amor novo consiglio non n'apporta," 9).

4.1]
"A little spark fosters a great flame" (Paradiso, I, 34) "Every other thing and every thought departs, and love alone remains there with you" ("Gentil mia donna, i' veggia," 44-45).

5.1]
"Love which exempts no one beloved from loving" (Inferno, V, 103). "Love led me to such joyful hope" ("Se col cieco desir che 'l cor distrugge," 11).

6.1]
"Now you can understand the greatness of the love that burns in me for you" (Purgatorio, XXI, 133-34). "I do not wish love to release me from such a tie" ("Perché quel che mi trasse ad amar prima," 17).

6.4]
Lot's wife. Cf. Genesis 19: 26.

7.1]
"Here spring is endless, here is every fruit" (Purgatorio, XXVIII, 143; the Italian of this line frequently reads: "Qui prima-vera è sempre ed ogni frutto). "Conversing with me and I with him" ("Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi," 14).

7.12]
his Book: the Song of Solomon 8: 6: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."

8.1]
"As if he said to God: 'I care for nothing else'" (Purgatorio, VIII, 12). "I hope to find pity, and not only pardon" ("Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono," .
"I, if I perish, perish": Esther 4: 16. When King Ahasuerus at the instigation of his counsellor Haman ordered the destruction of the Jews in his country, Esther, his young Jewish wife, risked the king's displeasure in an attempt to save her people. Adorning herself in royal apparel, she entranced Ahasuerus by her beauty and persuaded him to revoke his edict.

9.1]
"O noble and clear conscience!" (Purgatorio, III, . "Spirit more aglow with ardent virtues" ("Discolorato ài, Morte, il più bel volto," 3).

10.1]
"With better course and more propitious star" (Paradiso, I, 40). "Life flies and stays not for an hour" ("La vita fugge e non s' arresta un' ora," 1).

11.1]
"Come after me and let the people chatter" (Purgatorio, V, 13). "Relating the events of our life" ("Né mai pietosa madre al caro figlio," 12).

12.1]
"Love that converses with me in my mind" (Purgatorio, II, 112). "Love approaches in the fair face of this lady" ("Quando fra l'altre donne ad ora ad ora," 2).

13.1]
"And we will direct our eyes to the First Love" (Paradiso, XXXII, 142) "But I find a burden too great for my arms" ("Vergognando talor ch' ancor si taccia," 5).

14.1]
"And His Will is our peace" (Paradiso, III, 85). "Alone with these same thoughts, with time-changed locks" ("Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro," 32).

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/monna-innominata-sonnet-sonnets

This is Chaucer, by Benjamin Brawley

Gone are the sensuous stars, and manifold,
Clear sunbeams burst upon the front of night;
Ten thousand swords of azure and of gold
Give darkness to the dark and welcome light;
Across the night of ages strike the gleams,
And leading on the gilded host appears
An old man writing in a book of dreams,
And telling tales of lovers for the years;
Still Troilus hears a voice that whispers, Stay;
In Nature’s garden what a mad rout sings!
Let’s hear these motley pilgrims wile away
The tedious hours with stories of old things;
Or might some shining eagle claim
These lowly numbers for the House of Fame!"

Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer," the darkness is racial blackness

The Kraken, by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die

The kraken is an enormous mythical sea monster said to appear off the coast of Norway.

T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry's "depths, to the abyss of sorrow".[31] Other poets such as W. H. Auden maintained a more critical stance, stating that Tennyson was the "stupidest" of all the English poets, adding that: "There was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did."[32]
Wiki.

Analysis
This short but memorable poem was published in 1830, included in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. It is a sonnet, but it has fifteen lines instead of fourteen; it is modeled on the Petrarchan rather than Shakespearian sonnet with its form of three quatrains and a concluding couplet...


... Tennyson uses similar landscapes when conveying time—sea, river, island or other isolated locale, sunset and sunrise, the horizon, and the wasteland. Poems that suggest the first type of time include “Mariana,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” and “Tithonus”; poems that suggest the second type of time include “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Demeter and Persephone.”

“The Kraken” includes both types of time, and Welch argues that the enigmatic lyric is about “a deep truth that is imageless: the quality of time itself.” The first part of the poem is sleep, isolated, languid time that yields death to the end of time. The last sentence, disturbing the sonnet form, explodes to reflect the End Times, nearly outside of time, just as the kraken ...
http://www.gradesaver.com/tennysons-poems/study-guide/summary-the-kraken

Here's a poem called Dunbar by Anne Spencer

Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I—
Ah, how poets sing and die!

-Invictus Poem by William Ernest Henley






Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.






In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.






Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.





It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Good one castrol180

Invictus sounds like the poet was severely depressed and overwhelmed, yet fighting on and determined to overcome his situation, which he attributes to chance.

According to wiki, his work has elements of stoism

....With the message of displaying fortitude in the face of adversity, the poem evokes Victorian stoicism and a "stiff upper lip"....

(The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, of the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature). WIki

He seems to believe in nature's power over men but seems so intent on making us believe that he is in control of his fate. Sounds like a mixed message to me.

Back Yard
Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month;
to-night they are throwing you kisses.

An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a
cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.

Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.

unbanned

Obinnau:
unbanned

Appreciated

There is a trend that upbeat poetry reflecting happiness and good times get more analysis and reviews. The poem called Back Yard by Carl Sandburg is one such poem and there are a lot of reviews, interpretation and analyses on and offline.

This is in sharp contrast to the sad and painful poetry of the harlem renaissance.

Bai Li's poem called Farewell to a Friend

Green mountains bar the northern sky;
White water girds the eastern town
Here is the place to say goodbye;
You'll drift like lonely thistledown
With floating cloud you'll float away;
Like parting day I'll part from you
You wave your hand and go your way;
Our seeds still neigh, "Adieu, adieu!"

Critics have praised Li Bai’s use of persona, extremes of imagery, his mastery of formal poetic rules and his ability to combine all these with a seemingly effortless virtuosity to create inimitable poetry. A strong feature that marks many of his poems is the Taoist element, which emphasizes naturalness, spontaneity and simplicity.

If Thou Must Love Me, a Sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
“I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

If Thou Must Love Me is sonnet no.14 of the collection Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). She was a major woman poet in the Victorian era (1830-1890) of English literature. Sonnets from the Portuguese is a collection of 44 love sonnets published in 1850. In the sonnets Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows her love for her future husband Robert Browning, who himself was a great Victorian poet.

The sonnet is in the Italian or Petrarchan form of sonnet with the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CD CD CD.

Here's
Alfred Lord Tennyson; Summer Night


Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me

As source material for his poetry, Tennyson used a wide range of subject matter ranging from medieval legends to classical myths and from domestic situations to observations of nature. The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before and during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and descriptive writing.[25] He also handled rhythm masterfully.

Wiki

poem by Edward Thomas: Snow

In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: "Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast!"
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.

A haiku by Kobayashi Issa.

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!

Haikus seem to have the same purpose as African proverbs. The snail here is a small animal but is able to achieve against all odds just by persistence and perseverance.

By William Wordsworth entitled A Night Thought


Lo! where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny;
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly
How bright her mien!
Far different we--a froward race,
Thousands though rich in Fortune's grace
With cherished sullenness of pace
Their way pursue,
Ingrates who wear a smileless face
The whole year through
If kindred humours e'er would make
My spirit droop for drooping's sake,
From Fancy following in thy wake,
Bright ship of heaven!
A counter impulse let me take
And be forgiven

Berrying.Berrying, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

May be true what I had heard,
Earth's a howling wilderness,
Truculent with fraud and force,
Said I, strolling through the pastures,
And along the river-side
Caught among the blackberry vines,
Feeding on the Ethiops sweet,
Pleasant fancies overtook me
I said, 'What influence me preferred,
Elect, to dreams thus beautiful?'
The vines replied, 'And didst thou deem
No wisdom to our berries went?'

A poem by Walt Whitman called O Captain! My Captain


O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Here's a poem called Impression du Voyage by Oscar Wilde

The sea was sapphire coloured, and the sky
Burned like a heated opal through the air,
We hoisted sail; the wind was blowing fair
For the blue that to the eastward lie.
From the steep prow I marked with quickening eye
Zakynthos, every olive grove and creek,
Ithaca’s cliff, Lycaon’s snowy peak,
And all the flower-strewn hills of Arcady.
The flapping of the sail against the mast,
The ripple of the water on the side,
The ripple of girls’ laughter at the stern,
The only sounds:—when ’gan the West to burn,
And a red sun upon the seas to ride,
I stood upon the soil of Greece at last!

By Oscar Wilde entitled Magdalen Walks

The little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.
A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze,
The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,
The birds are singing for joy of the Spring's glad birth,
Hopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.
And the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love
Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,
And the gloom of the wych-elm's hollow is lit with the iris sheen
Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.
See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there,
Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew,
And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue!
The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.

Analysis
"Magdalen Walks" is a poem written by Oscar Wilde. The title is somewhat confusing in that it is most likely a reference to Mary Magdalen. The poem focuses on the beginning of Spring, which is around the same time Jesus died and was resurrected (Mary Magdalen was the first to see Jesus after his resurrection). The poem, then, is perhaps about the resurrection of Christ and the new growth of faith people had because of it.
"Magdalen Walks" is a five stanza poem with four lines in each. Each stanza is rhymed as ABBA. There is not a meter structure. The rhythm is kept through the rhymes and assonence (such as "sways and swings" and branch to branch".

Read more about Magdalen Walks by Oscar Wilde Analysis & Poem by www.poemofquotes.com

Haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

An ancient pond!
With a sound from the water
Of the frog as it plunges in

Poem by Henry David Thoreau

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings, --
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows

The Old Stoic, by Emily Brontë

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish’d with the morn;
And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, “Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!”
Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
’Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure

mily Jane Brontë (/ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /ˈbrɒnteɪ/;[1] 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848)[2] was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Wiki