Sophie Gee
speaker
10,871 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Sophie Gee’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 — 35 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
You didn't simultaneously sail and row, except if you were in the Rape of the Lock.
podcast-host
this passage, I think, is one of the cleverest and most ingenious in all of Pope's writing.
podcast-host
So the thing that is remarkable about The Rape of the Lock and what really kind of adds a great deal of playfulness, but also actually sort of dignity to his mock epic undertaking and incidentally caused him to become the most famous poet in England
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a result of this poem.
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is this device he comes up with, which is the sylphs and the nymphs, which are these kind of magical, ethereal creatures who kind of float and waft all around Belinda and her friends throughout the day and periodically kind of intervene in what's going on to guide the action.
podcast-host
And if Pope's joke about the gods of classical epic, he's kind of reducing them to micro-gods, sylphs and nymphs,
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But the thing that I think is really extraordinary about this passage I'm about to read is that he uses these invisible creatures filling the air to describe the action of wind on sails and the play of light on water.
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And it's just really, wow, the Thames is going
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It's a really remarkable piece of nature writing, actually.
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So, the lucid squadrons round the sails repair, soft o'er the shrouds the aerial whispers breathe, that seem but zephyrs to the train beneath.
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Some to the sun their insect wings unfold, waft on the breeze or sink in clouds of gold.
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Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, their fluid bodies half dissolved in light.
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Loose to the wind their airy garments flew, Thin glittering textures of the filmy dew, Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes, Where every beam new transient colours flings, Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.
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Amid the circle, on the gilded mast,
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Superior by the head was Ariel, who's the head nymph, head sylph, placed.
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His purple pinions opening to the sun, he raised his azure wand and thus begun.
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So this moment that we're seeing is the hinge that is going to get us from John Milton and the angels and the devils of Paradise Lost, who are this invisible squadron, these invisible war bands who people Paradise Lost.
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It's kind of getting us from there to Harry Potter.
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The whole of the literature is concentrated in that image of the Silves and the Ninks animating the sales as Belinda goes down the Thames.
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semi-solid by this point
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Showing 181–200 of 10,871 · page 10 of 544
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