William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really.

This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook.

Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what I can do.

On the website you’ll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

John Keats' 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought.

Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death.  A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death’.

He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he’d failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, sums up his disappointment.

Amongst the unfinished epics and plays, he’d written a handful of poems that guaranteed his place in any anthology of English poetry. But he didn't know that when he died.

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Charles Hamilton Sorley's 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

Charles Hamilton Sorley ( May 1895- October 1915)

Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings.

The few poems he had written were collected and published in January 1916 as ‘Marlborough and other poems’. This is taken from the slightly enlarged second edition of February 1916.

Had Sorely lived and continued to write, most of the poems in the book would probably have been filed away as ‘Juvenilia’. As it was, he didn’t get to revise any of them for publication.

He has been particularly well-served by Jean Moorcraft Wilson who not only wrote a Biography but collected and edited his letters and his poems.

You can read more about Sorely here:

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2017/05/charles-hamilton-sorely-footnote-poet.html

Geoffrey Hill's 'Funeral Music'

Sir Geoffrey Hill (!932-2016)

A sequence of eight sonnets, though the form is handled so skillfully you might miss the fact. Hill claimed he was attempting a ‘florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks’. The ‘Subject matter’ or the background, is the Wars of the Roses linked by the executions of the three men named at the beginning.

Hill was the only poet whose books I bought immediately they were published. I’ve never understood my fascination with his work, but it began when I read (silently) the last sonnet in Funeral Music and realised I was holding my breath.

Reading favourite poems aloud is an educational experience. Sometimes, after several attempts, the result is so far from what I thought it should be that it seems worth preserving no matter how wrong it feels..

A longer attempt to explain the fascination is here: https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2016/07/sir-geoffrey-hill-1932-2016.html

Edna St. VIncent Millay's 'Bluebeard'.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950).

This sonnet first appeared in ‘Renascence and Other Poems’. (1917). It’s a version of the Bluebeard story., perhaps best known in Perrault's tale from the 17th century.

By the twenty-first century the rewritten fairy tale has become a genre of its own. Angela Carter aside, few attempts are as interesting as Millay's original use of this story.