Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’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
And that was, you know, one of the lines of all poetry that Coleridge singled out for what Coleridge calls freshness of sensation.
Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water?
Who has not watched it with a new feeling?
from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure to snow that falls upon a river, a moment white, then gone forever.
So he misquotes it, but nevertheless, he likes it.
About line 70 or so, the time comes when Tam realizes, even though he's, you know, three sheets of the wind, that it is time for him to go home.
The wind is blowing.
It's a real sort of Hitchcock scene outside, isn't it?
Loud, deep, and long, the thunder bellowed.
That night, a child might understand the devil had business on his hand.
says Burns.
So he gets on his mare, who you mentioned, Meg, who's going to play an important part later on, and he heads off home.
And he heads towards Kirk Allaway, the church that Burns wanted memorialized in the Antiquities volume.
I was going to ask you about precisely that.
What do you make of all this sort of folkloric kind of connection with the landscape?
Yeah, so I suppose in that sense, it's not a million miles away from Rape of the Lock in that the mock quality to it, it's mock epic or mock heroic.
And Burns is very fond, isn't he, of introducing similes as bees fly home with loads of treasure,
as you might get a kind of an epic simile in, you know, Virgil or something like that.
So there's a game being played, isn't there, with kind of epic levels of literariness, just as there is in Pope.
Yes, it is a comic tale.
Showing 361–380 of 386 · page 19 of 20
← Previous
Next →