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Maud, and Other Poems (Version 2)

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Chapter: 9 | Listen:

Surely everyone knows “Maud”? Isn’t that the Victorian love song, where the man waits by the garden gate for his lover to appear for a secret rendezvous? Well, that may be the song, but Tennyson’s poem is longer and very much darker. It deals not with love but with the obsession of an unstable young man with the seventeen-year-old Maud, and his gradual descent into madness. The poem’s narrator has been excluded from an evening ball being held at Maud’s home, The Hall, and has climbed into her garden uninvited, convincing himself by a misreading the Language of Flowers that she has sent him a love-token in the form of a rose blossom. After the guests have left, Maud and her brother step out into the dawn, and soon the brother is lying mortally wounded at the narrator’s hand. He flees abroad, and later loses his reason after hearing of Maud’s own death. Finally, the narrator insists that he has at last recovered from his “old hysterical mock-disease” and has awakened to a better mind, fighting for his country in the Crimean War. But can he be believed? Many early reviewers took the narrator as stating the poet’s own views on war, but Tennyson himself responded that he would hardly have chosen a narrator with an “hereditary vein of insanity” to represent his personal opinions. The collection includes several other well-known Tennyson poems, including “The Brook, an Idyl”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. (Summary by Michael Maggs) […]

In a Belgian Garden and Other Poems

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Chapter: 28 | Listen: 1

These magnificent poems written by a lover of the natural splendor of untrodden lands are both thrilling and exhilarating. Visions and observations of the wonders of creation are gradually unlocked and elegantly illustrated in ways hitherto unimagined by the passive observer of the eclectic world that surrounds us, while sparing no omission of the very obvious and egregious rampant destruction, both physical and moral, of the Great War. Frank Oliver Call, the poet, the educator, the skillful wordsmith takes us on a journey to lands near and far, both those untouched by the ravages of civilization and those savagely ravaged by that same civilization run amok. While deftly expressing his love and awe for the raw beauty of nature and his condemnation for “Death’s dark wing” that had drifted over places tranquil and serene he once cherished, the poet concedes that much of life and its possible purpose is not nor never can be understood by us mortals. However, recognizing the imperative nature of life itself Call goes on to acknowledge that, “onward driven must our frail barques go,” while adding the plea, “O God, that we might know, might only know!” Come, then, come on this magical exploration of an era since passed, an era of beauty but one of death, destruction and devastation. Let us appreciate the prescience of this poet’s description of lives altogether too able to be transformed in an instant from peace to furious frenzy. And let us dream, dream of how idyllic life could, […]

Harmonium

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Chapter: 18 | Listen: 2

This is the first edition of Stevens’s first book, with poetry written between 1914 and 1923. A later edition was printed with the inclusion of additional poems and, somewhat surprisingly, three of the earlier poems omitted. – Summary by KevinS [chương_files]

Kobzar of the Ukraine

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Chapter: 38 | Listen:

In these poems speaks the struggling soul of a downtrodden people. To our western folk, reared in happier surroundings there is a bitter tang about some of them, somewhat like the taste of olives, to which one must grow accustomed . The Slavonic temperament, too, is given to melancholy and seems to dwell congenially in an atmosphere misty with tears. But he gravely misreads their literature who fails to perceive the grim resolve beneath the sorrow. In the struggle of the Ukrainians for freedom the spirit of this poet, who was born a serf, remains ever their guiding star. The translator of these poems spent considerable time in arriving at an understanding of the spirit of the poems and the nature of the situations described. Then the more formidable task was approached of trying to carry over not only the thought but something of the style, spirit and music of the original into the English tongue. – Summary by Introduction [chương_files]

Principles of the Christian Religion Expressed in Plain and Easy Verse

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Chapter: 25 | Listen: 2

The little verses now before the reader were written at the desire of my most worthy and honoured friend, the Reverend Mr. Clark of St. Albans, and are published at his request, as what he hopes may, by the divine blessing, do some good in the rising generation. I was the more willing to undertake the task, because I had often observed with how much ease and pleasure children learn verses by heart, how fond they are of repeating them, and, by consequence, how much longer they retain them than they do what they learn in prose. That simplicity and ease, which may suit children, I have been always careful to maintain; and have endeavoured, here and there, where I conveniently could, to strike the fancy with a little imagery, and especially to affect the hearts of my dear little scholars, by giving a serious and practical turn to the several truths which are delivered. It has also been my great care to insert nothing into these verses but what I apprehend the generality of serious Christians believe, so that I hope they will suit different denominations ; as indeed I could wish the rising age might be instructed in what is like to unite, rather than divide, us. Their own comfort, as well as the credit of our common Christianity, is much concerned in it. (From the Preface) [chương_files]

Five Nations Vol II

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Chapter: 26 | Listen: 1

Rudyard Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature and the youngest at the time to be so rewarded. His children’s stories and poems have been enduring expressions of his times, many tied to India, the country of his birth. Five Nations is a collection of poems covering the wide range of the British Kingdom at the time, though there is some debate as to what the Five Nations refer. There are two groups of poems in these volumes, unnamed poems and the service poems. Many of these have military themes and range over many wars of the British Empire. Volume II contains poems of the Five Nations and Service Poems. – Summary by Larry Wilson [chương_files]

Oak and Ivy

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Chapter: 56 | Listen: 1

“Oak and Ivy” is Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first collection of poetry. He was by far the most successful Black American to write poetry in the so-called Negro dialect, although he also wrote a lot of verse in standard diction. His poetry and prose often speaks of the frustrated aspirations of and bleak prospects for African Americans in a white supremacist era. – Summary by TriciaG [chương_files]

Opals

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Chapter: 39 | Listen: 1

At age 16, London blueblood Olive Custance already figured in literary circles shared by Oscar Wilde and John Gray. She later wrote for the “Yellow Book”, a notorious British quarterly of the late 1890’s, featuring poems, essays, short stories and artwork by many well-known writers and artists of the age. In 1902 she married Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, famed for his relationship with Oscar Wilde. Opals, her first published poetry collection, appeared in 1897 when she was just 23, to be followed by Rainbows (1902), The Blue Bird (1905) and The Inn of Dreams (1911). – Summary by Nemo [chương_files]

Sunken Garden and Other Poems

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Chapter: 24 | Listen:

This fantastic adventure into the realms of the imagination is a superb example of the incomparable skill of poet Walter de la Mare. In this collection the poet explores the intersection of reality and fantasy within the context of an earth-centeredness that extends far beyond our knowing present – an exploration garnered from dreams, from mindful awakening, indeed from ephemeral ventures into the hitherto unknown. In this series of related but diverse poems de la Mare appeals to our thoughtful consideration of his work based not solely on its subject matter but from an element of the supernatural interwoven within each verse. The poet’s work thus both unites and at times divides our previously familiar concepts and long-held beliefs with a component of the mystical progression of life itself as we each venture along a path in some ways familiar yet in other ways oddly disjointed and exotic. Prepare to be amazed at the journey on which Walter de la Mare, this exceptional poet, is about to take us. Prepare to depart on an adventure to the realms of this master poet’s Sunken Garden, a “green and darkling spot” where perhaps “a distant dreamer dreams.” Prepare to share in those universal reveries of prescience that bring wonder and amazement to us all. – Summary by Bruce Kachuk [chương_files]

Dawn Patrol, and Other Poems of an Aviator

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Chapter: 21 | Listen:

Paul Bewsher writes poems of a wartime aviator from his heart and soul. His heart longs for an end to the perils of war and the forced destruction meted out by him and his fellow soldiers while yearning for a return to the serenity of home. His soul is that of a fighter, an airman whose cockpit is both an escape from earthly strife and an agonizing wait for the sudden death that stalks him on each mission. Bewsher’s poems are made ever more meaningful by being written by one who has suffered the horrors of war; one who has survived but who has known many who did not; one who understands the longing for an end, the longing for the way life used to be, and the hunger for peace. Bewsher explores in his poetry a range of human emotions from the stance of one immersed in a struggle not of his own making but one essential to his own and his country’s survival. These are poems of a reality once lived and never forgotten, a reality indelibly etched in the mind of an aviator during a seemingly unending war. These are poems with vital lessons for us all. – Summary by Bruce Kachuk [chương_files]