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Italians consider Giacomo Leopardi one of the great poets of the nineteenth century, although his work is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. His life was short and bitter, and he was crippled by disease, usually in need of money, and cut off from the world around him. Most of the poetry for which he is praised is his lyric poetry, which is marked by the beauty, concreteness, and exactness of its language. Leopardi’s language is, in itself, an assertion and creation of human value, yet in all of his work, both prose and poetry, he expresses a realistic, pessimistic view of human existence. Leopardi believed that human belief in happiness is an illusion: Happiness is not now, but always to come. This illusion of happiness and good applies not only to individual lives but also to human institutions.

The speaker of this rather long dramatic monologue is a pagan Greek in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 340 c.e., lamenting the death of his Christian lover. The speaker tells of his visit to the house of the dead man and, of there watching the Christian rites and becoming aware not only that has he lost his lover to death, but that perhaps he never knew him at all. The poem does not quite fit the usual definition of a dramatic monologue, though, in that one cannot be sure whom the speaker is addressing. He may, indeed, be talking half to himself, even as he is reporting what has happened to someone else, someone who may have known the dead man, Myris, but not very well.

The wicked, one-eyed duke of Coffin Castle lives in his cold fortress along with his beautiful, warm niece Saralinda. There are thirteen clocks in the castle that stopped marking time at the same moment. The duke hates time; indeed, he believes he has killed it. The only things he loves are his jewels and, apparently, his niece. There have been many suitors for Saralinda, but all failed to pass the terrible tests the duke set for them.

“Philhellene,” which means “a lover of things Greek,” is a short dramatic monologue spoken by a king of one of the puppet monarchies on the edge of the Roman empire in western Asia. “Beyond the Zagros” (mountains that straddle the border between Iraq and Iran), this imaginary kingdom is far from the center of what the king regards as civilization. The time is not specified, although one can assume that it is sometime in or after the first century c.e. The king is addressing either his coin designer or one of his courtiers, a man named Sithaspes, about the design on a planned coin. The poem is in (in the original Greek) a very loose iambic meter, with line lengths usually from eleven to fourteen syllables; such a varied pattern allows the speaker to seem informal and colloquial, but the language is still highly controlled.

“Poem About People” is composed of thirteen unrhymed quatrains with no immediately obvious metrical pattern. Its title establishes its subject; written in the first person, the poem is the speaker’s quiet meditation on what people are in appearance and in actuality and how they relate to one another.

Eudora Welty uses a limited authorial voice in "No Place for You, My Love," although on several occasions, she enters the consciousness of the two central characters. These characters reveal few facts about themselves, especially the woman, and the authorial voice reveals little more directly. However, although the facts of the characters' lives and their feelings are not revealed, the details of their drive through the delta are clearly described.

The story opens at the end of a desolate, late autumn day in the aftermath of a great war. The landscape is a vast, empty prairie, with nothing but the fading traces of battle to be seen. Civilization is dead, and few survivors have been reduced to a primitive state. In an earthen cave, four men huddle by a small peat fire; what wood there is must be saved for the coming, deadly winter. Doctor Jenkins is wrapping up four books from which he has been reading: the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, Herman Melville's Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851), and Dante's La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), the only books he has saved from the catastrophe. These books, he remarks, contain what was good in the old civilization, even though they could not save that civilization. He adds that he hopes that they will help the people of the next civilization to be strong enough that they will not fall behind when they become clever.

In May, 1963, the Polish journalist and essayist Ryszard Kapuściński was an observer at the establishment, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) under the sponsorship of Emperor Haile Selassie. In the intervening years he made other trips to Ethiopia. After the fall of the emperor in 1974, Kapuściński returned to Ethiopia to report on what had happened. There he made contact with former members of the deposed Emperor’s household. With their statements as its base, this book is Kapuściński’s presentation as well as his interpretation of the events and conditions that brought an end to Haile Selassie’s reign.

Poynton. English home of Mrs. Gereth and her son that is the focus of the novel. Mrs. Gereth lived in the house with her husband until his death and intends to remain there until her son marries. The novel describes the house only in bits and pieces, sometimes in contrast with other places, but these descriptions are all aimed at showing how important the house is to the novel’s meanings.

Pointz Hall. Ancestral home of the Olivers in southern England. As the house bears a weight of historical symbolism, it needs to be seen clearly. It is middle-sized, as English manor houses go, whitish, attractive to passersby, but oddly situated, facing north, away from the sun, and standing low in its meadow so that it suffers in winter. In that way, it is atypical, not quite fully English. Its furniture is mid-Victorian, and thus out of date—contrasting with the furnishings and modern bathrooms that the newly rich coming down from London, such as the Manresas, have put into the old houses they have bought.

Heorot (HEH-oh-rot). Headquarters of the aging Danish ruler Hrothgar. The great timbered hall is elaborately described, for only here can human beings be, within limits, civilized. (The unnamed great hall of the warrior-hero Beowulf’s uncle, King Hygelac of the Geats, resembles Heorot.) A great open hall with smaller divisions, Heorot is adorned with gold. Its approach is by a stone-paved road. It has benches and tables at which the retainers of Hrothgar sit. At night it is lit by torches, and its light reaches out to the surrounding wild. It is only within the king’s hall that court poets can tell and retell the heroic and dreadful tales of the northern peoples, for these tales demand a proper setting for their force and meaning. The stories give the values of the culture, both positively and negatively. They teach about the importance of loyalty and about the consequences of both loyalty and betrayal.

Australian novelist and playwright. Long Fiction:

Henry’s throne room. Villa salon designed to look like the throne room of the historical Henry IV in Goslar, Germany. However, as the young “counsellors” of “Henry IV,” the mad hero of the play, reveal, this room is not always in Goslar but sometimes in numerous other places. Nevertheless, for Henry IV, it has been a real throne room, even though he has not in actuality left the villa for all the years of his madness. However, in the third act, it is, for everyone, merely a room in the villa, where Henry suggests in the story of the Irish priest that we all play parts and so in a manner are as mad as he was or perhaps is. At the end, it is the room in which Henry must always be “mad,” in order not to be punished for his truly insane stabbing of Belcredi.

“Beware: do not read this poem” is written in free verse, divided into six unequal stanzas. There are no capital letters, and the poem has many spelling irregularities and abbreviations, with apparently random spacing in many lines. There are very few punctuation marks except for an occasional comma or slash, usually in an odd place. However, a single voice speaks the whole poem, and, although there are no neat markers to indicate divisions, the poem can be divided into three distinct parts. Moreover, despite its appearance on the page, the “grammar” of the poem is straightforward and clear.

Giovanni Corte arrives at an unnamed sanatorium somewhere in Italy to be treated for a mild case of an unnamed disease. He is pleased by the appearance and amenities of the sanatorium building. It has seven floors, with a fine view from the upper floors, especially from the seventh floor where he is roomed. Unfortunately for those on the bottom floor there is no view at all except for the trees in front of the windows. In a conversation with his nurse, Corte learns that the seventh floor is for people like himself, those hardly ill at all. However, the lower floors are for people who are most ill. The first floor is only for those who are dying. Appalled but fascinated by this system, he looks down at the bottom floor and sees that most of its rooms have their venetian blinds pulled down. Now he discovers that the blinds are pulled down only when a patient has recently died.

Pale Fire purports to be a scholarly edition of the poem Pale Fire by the American poet John Shade. There is, as part of the novel, an editor’s foreword, then the poem itself, followed by five times as many pages of editorial commentary as there are pages to the poem, and finally an index. The editor, Charles Kinbote, was a one-time colleague of Shade at Wordsmith University in New Wye, which is in Appalachia. Kinbote tells a story, or rather a number of stories, all by indirection because there is no simple “and then” of events in the novel.

*Scotland. Roderick’s Scottish home is sketchily described, but, as his grandfather is a landowner, the house and estate must be somewhat grand and extensive. After Roderick is driven out by the malice of his relatives, that home becomes a kind of lost and found Eden, for, as an adult, he will return to it, rich, happily married, and reunited with his lost father.

When Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published “Ulysses” in 1842, his contemporaries tended to read the poem straightforwardly, as a speech given by a heroic figure who asserts that there is value in learning, in doing, and in taking risks. Later critics, however, have read it as the almost unconscious confession of a failed king trying to assert himself even as he reveals himself. Such later treatments, intelligent and insightful as they are, still tend to make the poem into a case study. It is true that Tennyson’s Ulysses is not a perfect man: He proposes to give up his duties, abandon his wife, and risk the lives of his companions, but his search is his reason for living, and Tennyson makes this need to go on searching the central theme of his poem.

Bassington house. London home of Francesca Bassington, whose house is hers only until Emmeline Chetrof marries. Thus, it is not truly a home, and its very impermanence drives Francesca’s actions and suggests the shallowness of the society in which she lives. Francesca’s only visitors seem to be her son and her brother—one more indication that the house will disappear. The furnishings that Francesca prizes she has acquired mostly by chance; her “delicious bronze Fremiet” she buys with winnings from horse racing; some Dresden figurines are given to her by an admirer; other Dresden figurines she acquires with bridge winnings. There are other things she values, in part because they come from marvelous, mysterious places, but above all because they are somehow connected with her own history. Her prize possession, the “Van der Meulen” painting, turns out to be a fake.

In “Ithaka,” Cavafy makes use of the story from the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), Homer’s epic tale of Odysseus’s ten-year struggle to return home from the Trojan War. This return is a kind of scaffolding for making a value statement about human life. The island kingdom of Ithaka becomes a symbol of completion and value, and the attempt to return should be the purpose of life. Odysseus is driven by a powerful longing for his home, a longing that ends with his arrival there; but for Cavafy, Ithaka is not a place, but a process, the journey itself, and the journey is one’s life. In brief, the purpose of life cannot simply be wrapped up by its ending; it is in living that one finds value.

According to Plutarch, on the night before Marc Antony died, he heard the sounds of the retinue of his tutelar god, Bacchus, leaving the city of Alexandria, in effect telling Antony that he no longer had any divine support in his struggle against Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. That departure is the subject of Cavafy’s poem; the speaker is simply a voice addressing Antony, telling him not to mourn but to accept his fate without fear and without regret, a lesson certainly, but a lesson about how to live, not how to get to heaven.

Tommaso Campanella composed The City of the Sun in Italian in 1602, as La Città del Sole. It was not published until after he translated it, with significant changes, into Latin, the language of the learned during his time. The Italian version is generally regarded as truer to Campanella’s thought.