To Althea, from Prison Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

Careful, you might slip on all the liquid in this poem! There's the "flowing cups" of wine, which aren't diluted with any water (symbolized by the Thames), the "deep" (which contains fish that "tip...

"To Althea, from Prison" is full of voices. There's the whisper of the first stanza, the speaker's claim that he will sing in a "shriller note," and his declaration to "voice aloud" his support for...

Birds are mentioned several times here, and other things are compared to them; so are fish. The speaker repeatedly turns to animals in order to define his own situation. Birds can fly anywhere they...

The poem is addressed by a prisoner to a woman named Althea. Not surprisingly, prisons, and the language associated with them, are everywhere in this poem. Descriptions that don't directly relate t...