Sophie Gee
speaker
11,180 appearances
40 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 — 36 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
gog to see which passage you're going to read, because if you don't read the one that I really love,
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to bust in and read it.
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high Catholic, Catholic high society.
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exactly right.
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They head down to Hampton Palace, so from central London upriver to the area around Richmond now.
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And interesting fun fact about that, Jonty, Pope's boats in the scene have both oars and sails, which is Pope's invention.
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That was not actually what
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were like.
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Yeah.
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You didn't simultaneously sail and row, except if you were in the Rape of the Lock.
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this passage, I think, is one of the cleverest and most ingenious in all of Pope's writing.
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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.
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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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Showing 481–500 of 11,180 · page 25 of 559
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