 "The Death of Amnon," a long poem in blank verse (regarded as the most serious and prestigious poetic metre by eighteenth-century literary theorists), divided into five cantos, tells the violent and sombre biblical story of how King David's son Amnon raped his sister Tamar and was killed by their half brother Absalom.Other poems, mostly in more informal iambic tetrameter, concentrate on themes that were conventional for the pastoral mode in poetry (love, friendship, loss, the seasons, the country versus the city life), as well as poetics ("On Reading Pope's Eloisa to Abelard", "Critical Fragments on some of the English Poets"), philosophical topics ("Observation on the Works of Nature"; "Friendship.An Ode"), and occasional observations from everyday life ("Written while the Author sat on a Cock of Hay"; "On an Unsociable Family").