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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
In truth, as the audience knows, Gloucester is the victim of a horrible trick.
He's been convinced by one son, Edmund, that his other son, Edgar, has been planning to kill him, and Edgar has fled to avoid capture.
But the story is completely Edmund's wicked invention.
Edgar is entirely innocent.
And there is something else Gloucester doesn't realise.
Poor Tom is his son Edgar, in what must be a very good disguise.
Gloucester and Kent finally persuade the mad king to stop talking and to take shelter.
No words, no words Hush, says Gloucester.
And as they enter the hovel, poor Tom, in his feigned madness, sings a little song.
Child Rowland to the dark tower came, his word was still Fi foe and fum I smell the blood of a British man.
And so ends Act three, scene four.
Phew.
You might think, and the play's only half way through.
My name is Seamus Perry, I'm a professor of English literature at Oxford and Master of Bale College, and I'm talking as always to Mark Ford, poet, critic, and professor of English at University College London.
And this is the latest in the series of conversations about narrative poems, poems that tell stories.
And today's subject is the great Victorian poet Robert Browning.
Browning's most famous narrative poem is the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and we'll come on to that, but we wanted to start with one of his darker masterpieces, a deeply mysterious and intensely creepy poem, which had its origins in that odd little scrap of song that Edgar sings on the Heath in Shakespeare's play, Child Rowland to the Dark Tower Came.
Browning wrote it in january eighteen fifty three and
Part of a resolution to write a poem every day.
Charles Rowland was the second product of this admirable plan, which was very soon abandoned.
Showing 21–40 of 386 · page 2 of 20
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