The Poetry Voice

Wilfrid Owen's 'The Parable of the Old man and the Young'

29 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to...

John Dressel's 'Lets Hear It For Goliath'

23 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

John Dressel (b1934) I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. Like Hamlet, (who a...

Gwyn Thomas’ 'You've Lived'.

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) This is the first of a short run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make ...

W.B.Yeats' 'Politics'

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) I have been rereading Yeats. I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of...

Roy Fisher's Birmingham Screwdriver.

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This poem is an extract from 'Talking to Cameras', the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he ...

W.B.Yeats' 'The Fisherman'

14 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential. At some point in his career Yeats had wante...

Two Epitaphs for an Army of Mercenaries

29 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The second of these two poems was written in response to the first. A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. To...

from 'Watt' by Samuel Beckett

19 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel 'Watt' where it’s set out as continuous prose. Bu...

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Last of the Light Brigade'

04 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936 This isn’t one of Kipling’s best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here i...

Memory, from A Man of Heart.

26 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This is taken from A Man of Heart, published by Shearsman press (2023) Maxim 1 History is a record of brutality tempered by outbursts of idealism....

The Wassail ceremony. Vortigern meets Rowena

18 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

If you’d like to see the Middle English version I based this on:Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge.   & þus ærest sæ...

Hengist Leaves for Britain. From Liam Guilar's 'A Man of Heart'.

03 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This extract is taken from ‘A Man of Heart’ by Liam Guilar, published by Shearsman in January 2023. The Venerable Bede dated this event to 450 AD...

Michael Alexander's 'Beowulf Reduced'

26 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Alexander’s translations of Old English poetry, published by Penguin Classics, were my introduction to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England...

Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'

09 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Browning (1812-1889) There’s a story. A bemused reader asked Browning what this poem meant. ‘Well,’ said the poet, ‘when I wrote it on...

William Shakespeare's 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'

05 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28 Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the...

Jeremy Hooker's '1st of July 2016

03 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941) I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the first day of the Somme offensive in 1...

Liam Guilar's 'Akhmatova's requiem'

12 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova' on a previous podcast. Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s tim...

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Way through the Woods'.

04 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) If it weren’t for the rhymes, this poem feels as though it could have been written by Thomas Hardy. Kipling could be ...

Anna Akhmatova's 'Requiem'

01 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966 ‘Requiem’ is Akhmatova’s memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, h...

Patrick Kavanagh's 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin..'

07 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a...

Taliesin's 'Marwnat Owein'. The lament for Owain son of Urien Rheged.

06 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Taliesin (6th Century) There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in...

Alun Lewis' 'The Swan's way'

10 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) Considered by some to be one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war. This is his take on the m...

Liam Guilar's 'These heroics One and Two'.

25 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Two poems, written some years apart. The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the impl...

Dylan Thomas' 'The Force that though the green fuse drives the flower'

19 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. naturally, it had nothing to do with school, I found the ...

Susan Watson's 'Why she began to study the works of Sir Thomas Malory'.

09 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Susan Watson The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during t...

William Blake's 'London'.

01 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

William Blake (1757-1827) For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and pos...

Liam Guilar's 'Byron In Venice: The poet in Exile.'

18 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Byron in Venice (The poet in exile) The debris of a city in decline slops at the crumbling steps, as the sun sets over palaces  even dusk can’t d...

Miroslav Holub's ''A History lesson'

13 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Miroslav Holub, (1923 –1998) Holub lived in Prague, and worked as an immunologist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Immunology of Nude Mice’. His o...

Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'.

11 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) It’s one of the superficial oddities of English poetry that the First World War produced an enormous amount of poetry, ...

Dafydd ap Gwilym's 'Love's affliction'. (Cystudd Cariad)

06 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.Unfortunately it won’t l...

R.S. Thomas' 'Mice'

04 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Luis Quintais' 'Amphitheatre' (trans Lesley Saunders)

18 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Luis Quintais (1968-) You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on...

Liam Guilar's 'After the Funerals'

05 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'. A listener asked for the text of the poem as well. After the Funerals one by one they take th...

Hafez 'What memories' (trans Dick Davis)

27 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90) We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of...

from Prudentius' 'Hamartigenia'. On Free Will.

19 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

‘Prudentius’, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?) Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. Thi...

Jeremy Hooker's 'Novelty'

12 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941) I don't often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one. It's taken from Hooker's 'Selec...

Jeremy Hooker's 'Gull on a Post'

05 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Jeremy Hooker (Born 1941) Shearsman published Hooker’s Selected poems (1965-2018) in 2020. It’s an impressive body of work, through provoking, mo...

Lewis Carroll's 'You are Old Father William'

28 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is ...

William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

23 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really. This reading was a request. Which reminds me ...

Meirion Jordan's 'Arawn Lord of Annwn'

22 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Meirion Jordan (Born 1985) This is the second of two readings of poems based on the Welsh prose Mabinogion. This is taken from Meirion Jordan’s ‘...

from Mathew Francis' 'The Mabinogi' Rhiannon's arrival

19 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This extract is taken from ‘The Mabinogi’, (Faber 2017), Francis’ retelling of the first four stories in the collection of eleven Medieval Welsh...

Dick Davis' 'A Translator's Nightmare'

14 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Dick Davis (Born 1945) Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Lov...

Liam Guilar's 'Just once'

08 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

‘Coke’ in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light. This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close We...

John Keats' 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'.

06 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Keats (1795-1821) Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought. Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an...

George Herbert's 'The Collar'

01 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

George Herbert 1593-1633 Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Langu...

Alfred De Musset's 'On a Dead Woman' (Sur une Morte)

16 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857) The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte’ of the poem, the ...

The Archpoet's confession

09 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The Archpoet (12th century) ‘The Archpoet’ is the name given to a writer of a handful of Latin lyrics of which this ‘Confession’ is the most ...

Rudyard Kipling's 'If'

02 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) There was a time poems entered the language and were recycled in daily usage. And ‘If’ is perhaps one of the best exa...

Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Somnambule Ballad'

28 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) (Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill) For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the ...

from Christopher Logue's 'War Music' 2. The Death of Patroculus.

27 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) This is my second reading from ‘War Music’. In the first, Patroculus has begged Achilles for the loan of his armour...

from Christopher Logue's 'War Music'. 1 Patroculus pleads with Achilles.

20 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) A fine poet in his own work, Logue’s most lasting achievement should be his ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad. He did...

Ovid's 'Pygmalion' trans Arthur Golding

14 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Arthur Golding (1536-1605) Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Bc-17/18 AD) Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ written in Latin in the first decade of the First Cent...

Sappho's 'Fragment 31'

11 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Possibly the most famous female poet in history? Well known and highly respected in her own Greek culture. Her name is still very well known, though p...

Charles Hamilton Sorley's 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

07 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings. The few po...

Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'.

30 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) ‘Light verse’ is often a dismissive term. Light verse can be clever, witty, humorous, entertaining, memorable and enjoy...

Carol Ann Duffy's 'You'

23 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Carol Ann Duffy (1955-) This is the first poem in Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ (2005), which is either a book length love poem or a book length sequence o...

John Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'

21 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Keats In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalotte, the metaphor is buried by the story. In La Belle Dame sans Merci, the story is the metaphor. The narrati...

Thomas E. Spencer's 'How McDougall topped the score'

14 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas E. Spencer (1845-1911) I know nothing about Spenser except he wrote this poem and I own a signed, 1906 copy of ‘How McDougall Topped the Sco...

Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'

03 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) Another poem in which the poet has taken a story and adapted it. Tennyson was a great poet, if technique is a cri...

C.P. Cavafy's 'The God Abandons Anthony'

02 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) This is the second of Cavafy’s poems on the Podcast. Like the first it plays off a classical story. In this case it ...

David Jones from 'The Fatigue'

26 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

David Jones (1895-1974) Why me? In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one? More generally, why did...

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'The City of Yes and the City of No'.

25 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017) For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Perhaps even more visible than the more critically acclaimed...

Liam Guilar 's 'Shackleton's Grave.'

18 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This is the last poem in ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Shackleton’s Grave(A Wish)  There will be peace and an end to traveling ,the colour of ...

R.S.Thomas' 'Bravo'

17 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admi...

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Whoso List to Hunt'

27 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) When does English Poetry begin? You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen ...

Sir Walter Ralegh's 'What is our life?'

21 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618) The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it a...

Robert Graves' 'Ulysses'

14 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Graves (1895-1985) There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily...

W.B.Yeats' 'For Anne Gregory'

07 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ outpu...

Liam Guilar's 'You never asked me for the Moon'

30 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me. My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lad...

Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

23 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual. ...

Seamus Heaney's 'Postscript'

16 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) RTE produced a box set of cds of Heaney reading his collected poems. And once you’ve heard him read them, they never soun...

Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

08 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Browning (1812-1889) Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the l...

Liam Guilar's 'More than a broken token song'

01 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and aff...

Basil Bunting's 'Now there's no hope of going back'

25 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting w...

John Agard's 'Reporting from the front line of the great Dictionary Disaster'

18 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Agard (1949-) My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’. I don’t know if I’...

John Clare's 'I Am'

11 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Clare (1793-1864) Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poe...

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

04 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting ...

Louise MacNeice's 'Thalassa

27 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive...

Liam Guilar's 'The Ugly Little Man's Version'

20 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Rumplestiltskin. This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the e...

Percy Shelley's 'England 1819'

18 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder t...

Robert Burns' 'A red red Rose'

13 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Burns (1759-1796) One of the glories of English poetry, or poetry in English, is the short lyric. There are thousands of them, and some of the...

John Betjeman's 'A Subaltern's love Song'

11 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) One of the most popular English language poets of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million co...

George Gascoigne's 'Gascoigne's Lullabie'

06 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

George Gascoigne (1535-1578) I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this po...

Robert Graves' 'The Persian Version'

04 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Graves (1895-1985) The ‘Greek Version’, which is the ‘historical version’ is that in 490 BCE, the citizens of Athens and some allies...

Liam Guilar's 'My Grandmother's story'

30 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Liam Guilar The most frightening ghost stories I’ve encountered were told around the table by my English Grandmother and my Irish Father. There was...

Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'

28 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Student: Sir! Is he trying to get her clothes off….? Me:…. Student: It’s not gonna work is it? If it’s not surpri...

Dylan Thomas' 'Do not go gentle into that good night'

23 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Form became a fetish in some kingdoms of poetry world in the later twentieth century. Creative writing students practised Se...

Robert Service's 'The Cremation of Sam McGee'

21 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Service (1874-1958) You could turn your nose up at Robert Service and his poems. He called them verse, poetry was something other people wrote...

Louis MacNeice's 'The Introduction'

15 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) One of the underrated poets of the twentieth century. A fine critic, an entertaining writer of prose and a fine poet, (un...

Basil Bunting's 'What the Chairman Told Tom'.

14 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) Nasty little words, nasty long words, it's unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They're Reds, addicts, all delin...

Andy Brown's 'Casket' from part V 'The High Barrow'

08 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Andy Brown This is taken from Brown’s sequence ‘Casket’ (Shearman 2019). The casket in question is the Franks Casket, an 8th century Whale bon...

John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' from Book 12, Adam and Eve leave Paradise

06 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the third of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book Twelve,  line 624 ff. It’s the end of th...

John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' from Book Nine, Satan sees Eve.

02 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the second of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book Nine,  line 421 ff Satan has escaped fro...

John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' from Book One

31 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the first of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book One, lines 242-270 The story begins with th...

T.S. Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi'

25 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) A poem in three movements. In the first, Eliot catches the grumbling voice of a man unaccustomed to hard travelling, rememberi...

Christina Rossetti's 'A Christmas Carol'

24 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) An obvious choice for the season. Perhaps better known as the Carol, ‘In the Bleak Mid Winter’. It’s interesti...

Peeping Tom Speaks from 'Lady Godiva and Me'

19 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry. My idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in ...

from 'Lady Godiva and me' The Modern City

19 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry. The idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in t...

W.B.Yeats' 'The Second Coming'

17 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) ‘The best lack all conviction’: It’s not always true, but there are times, like the present, when it does seem...

Thom Gunn's 'Expression'

12 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) ‘I have been reading my contemporaries’ This is the first year since I started school when I have not been obliged to read...