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Here is my second podcast.

PODCAST NO 2

The theme of my second podcast is love.
Let’s begin with some sonnets by William Shakespeare. 

Most of his delightful 14-line creations are about love—in all its glory and sometimes in its less wondrous incarnations. There are 154 of them, each divided into three quatrains and ending in a rhyming couplet. Some phrases from the sonnets will seem familiar to you because they have inspired other art forms, like movies and television shows. “The Darling Buds of May” springs to mind. This was the name of a book written by H.E. Bates, published in 1958 and later made into a British television series of the same name. However that very phrase appeared first in Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 18, first published in 1609.

We’ll start with this sonnet, number 18.
Sonnet number 91 is a more  passionate call on love.
Sonnet number 94 seems a lot darker. Was the Bard’s love life going through a rocky phase when he wrote this one?
Sonnet number 116 has been called “The Wedding Sonnet.” I chose a quotation from it to be engraved on a wedding present for my niece without knowing this at the time. Either a stroke of luck, or, I’m more inclined to believe, a natural fit.

Sonnet number 130 puts me in mind of Germaine Greer’s wonderful detective work in her book  Shakespeare’s Wife. Not a lot is known about Anne Hathaway nor indeed about the Bard himself, but Greer’s punctilious research offers some interesting observations. It’s true Shakespeare addresses his “mistress” in this poem, but in his time the titles “mistress” and “wife” were often interchangeable, weren’t they?
 
Next is a poem written more than 200 years after Shakespeare. I’ve heard a few objections to it because some believe it denigrates women. I don’t believe it does, but can see where this thought is coming from. In the past women have been blamed for attracting men through witchcraft and nobody knows how many innocent females were burned at the stake for spurning a powerful male. I’m afraid this poem casts as much of a spell over me as the fairy child casts over the hapless knight-at-arms. It is of course, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats.

Now a poem about the aftermath of love. Written somewhere between 1866 and 1902, it is “The Ruined Maid” by Thomas Hardy. I love the utterly subversive nature of this poem and wonder at the controversy it caused when first published.

Probably one of the most famous love poems ever written is Sonnet number 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an English Romantic poet of the Victorian era. Born Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, in 1806 she married another Romantic poet, Robert Browning, moving to Italy with him in 1846 where she lived till she died in 1861. Although Robert Browning may now be better-known than his wife, during her lifetime she was the more popular and celebrated poet.
 
Another remarkable female poet is Emily Dickinson who was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in the United States in 1830. Though she came from a prominent family, her poetry was not widely known until well after her death. I’m going to read you “Wild Nights” published in 1861 but modern in its style and considerations. A poet whose work I’m reading today has a similar reference to physical love, though Dickinson’s poem pre-dated his work by almost 100 years.
 

My last offering for today is an excerpt from a wonderful radio play written in 1954 by Dylan Thomas. Under Milkwood was commissioned by the BBC. Apparently Dylan Thomas was still writing the play at its first performance, handing pages he’d just written to the actors, who, without rehearsal, went live to air. No pressure. This play for voices only was later made into a stage play and then into films in 1972 and 2014—which I have to admit I haven’t seen. I wonder though how Under Milkwood has translated into film for it is such a gloriously sustained poem composed to utterly beguile our ears. The radio play invites its listeners to enter the dreams and thoughts of the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village, “Llareggub” which is “Buggerall” spelled backwards.

This excerpt is the dreamed exchange between the blind sailor, Captain Cat, and his lady love-of-the-night, Rosie Probert.
Until next week. . .

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