Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for school.
That and some Poe stories for fun. I just read a very interesting one I never knew of called Eleonora
. Obviously it's alluding to his wife/cousin Virginia Clem, who is the Lenore of The Raven and the Annabel Lee of that poem. She was the true love of his life. It is said he used to weep himself to sleep on her grave and thus the famous closing lines to Annabel Lee.
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
In fact reading the story and the poem side by side on can see it clearly. He constantly speaks of Eleonora's bright eyes in the story and he makes it clear it is his first cousin, just like Virginia Clem was, who he grew up with. In the story the narrator and Eleonora fall in love in a mystical valley called the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass and then Eleonora dies, but before she dies the narrator makes a vow never to love another woman, under a clearly grim fate if he should. The narrator breaks his vow, just like Poe ended up finding another woman to satisfy his romantic leanings, but he is absolved of breaking his vow by Eleonora and granted permission to marry this other woman by his dead beloved. The story is almost a narrative poem in itself, more mystical than a story in terms of a story line. It's so clear who and what he is writing about. Written towards the of his life it is a clear way to mystically cope with the death of Virginia. http://poestories.com/read/eleonora