Voice of the Muse: Recent Episodes
Voice of the Muse
Well this was somewhat epic. I only ever do these recordings in a single take, with no editing. This may explain some of their faults. This has long been one of my favourite poems, but reciting it in one single take was akin to a freeclimb on a particularly difficult pitch. This piece is just … Continue reading "Ballad of the Long Legged Bait – Dylan Thomas"
I have loved Muir since childhood. Perhaps this poem was inspired in part by him experiencing the catastrophe of the loss of his childhood farm in Orkney at the age of 14, and thus, his idyll. Doubtless lucre was involved. This poem comes to my mind whenever great catastrophe strikes blindly at us as a … Continue reading "The Castle – Edwin Muir"
Continuing the theme of distance, wistfulness, memory, loss and regret, and connection across both distance and time, here is a lifelong favourite of mine. Thomas Hardy is surprisingly little known as a poet, though in my opinion is one of the truly great poems of the English Language. Almost all his poetry was written after … Continue reading "The Phantom Horsewoman – Thomas Hardy"
This has long been a favourite of, well, nearly everyone who loves poetry. It is certainly one of my lifelong favourites. There is something about the theme of humanity becoming lost again in nature, being overwhelmed, becoming a nostalgic shadow, that speaks to me in these particular times.
This gem by the astoundingly prolific – yet completely unknown in her lifetime – Emily Dickinson seems like an exceptionally appropriate poem for this time of enforced distance from our loved ones, friends, and family.
This is a beautiful piece which spoke to me and millions of others who lived through the continual feeling of doom that pervaded the period of the Cold War, and its continuous threat of Global Thermonuclear War. This present crisis, unnprecedented in the modern world, has brought to mind again Muir’s words of the forgotten … Continue reading "The Horses – Edwin Muir"
This is a poem written on New Year’s Eve 2019 by myself. I haven’t written a poem for more than 20 years but today in the garden, clearing away the dead matter of the past year with my hands and mind, I thought about the grave of Ertola, and decided I would write this before … Continue reading "Ertola"
Since childhood, but now as a professional mariner, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Long Trail” is a poem which, every Autumn, resonates strongly in my heart. His description of the yearning for human migration stretch back through the centuries to his time, and indeed through the millennia to the times of our forebears the hunter gatherers. We … Continue reading "The Long Trail"
I have been despairing of late of the political and social polarisation of our world. It reminds me of the 1930s. It reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s timeless poem, Dover Beach. Unfortunately my microphone was malfunctioning slightly on this recording, so it was recorded too low. I will let it stand, for now. But headphones … Continue reading "Dover Beach"
I recorded this with only a laptop microphone, so my apologies for sound quality. It is a poem which is among the first I remember my father reading to me, though I was very young at the time, clearly it spoke to me anyhow. Curious thinking about that now. He has now been dead for … Continue reading "And Death Shall Have No Dominion – Dylan Thomas"