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
Long poem.
Our undergraduates were not always appreciative of having to read this what 20,000 lines all telling the same story from different perspectives.
So narrative was actually completely central to the ways in which Browning Browning's poetry operated, that he was always telling stories.
But there are often stories that derive from earlier sources, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin and Charles Rowland.
And Charles Rowland, in particular,
Inhabits this hinterland, as literary hinterland, in which it is almost like a phantasmagoric crossroads in which Shakespeare, along with Dante, along with um British fairy tales, along with kind of legends, seem to kind of coalesce.
Obviously, it's got the
envelope of Arthurian knighthood, uh s Mort Dartha, again, uh a s a subject for Tennyson as well as Browning.
So we have Child Rowland and Child is a is a version.
of the knight.
And I guess Spencer's Fairy Queen is obviously also important.
But we have a knight who, unlike in the Fairy Queen, is not is disconnected from any particular allegorical purpose or quest.
He's on a kind of anti quest.
He's got a kind of crazed anti narrative in which all he hopes to do is not fail.
And failure means being defeated in a way
Which isn't as inglorious as the ways in which Cuthbert and Giles and all the other knights he mentioned have failed.
No.
So it it is a poem which.
The the dreamlike aspect of it does make it into a kind of existential poem, as well as a narrative poem, because he is so alone apart from
the cripple at the beginning, uh to use um Browning's term, everything in the poem is deformed or malevolent or malign in some way.
Showing 21–40 of 404 · page 2 of 21
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