Mark Ford
speaker
404 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That's a waster and a boaster.
And I suppose, Tam...
could be characterized as fitting into the notion of the blustering drunkard.
It's a kind of stereotype.
And this poem has surely played a significant part in kind of propagating it around the world.
It's immensely successful and popular, this poem.
And if you go to Ayrshire, you can have the Tam O'Shanter experience.
You can even go to Johnny Souter's cottage.
And it somehow has created a myth of that little bit of Ayrshire.
And the narrative is fairly simple, that he gets blind drunk and then he has to ride home.
And he knows his disapproving wife is waiting at home for him and will tell him off.
And I suppose I was interested, Seamus, how much does this connect with Burns' own kind of roistering experience?
He had...
quite a lot of children out of wedlock, did he not?
though he gets away with it in the end, not to pre-empt the ending, that it's hard to know to what extent this is a sort of mock epic in the way in which kind of the Rape of the Lock is a mock epic, isn't it?
That it has kind of epic aspects to it, the journey and the meeting with the supernatural, going into the underworld, meeting the devil.
So in terms of the earlier narrative poems, it's got sort of similarities with Paradise Lost.
and the Rape of the Lock in terms of its evocation of kind of Christian devils or supernatural in relation to the sylphs.
But we're also aware that this could be just a fantasy.
It depends a bit on how we interpret Meg losing her tail, doesn't it?
Showing 341–360 of 404 · page 18 of 21
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