A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed is a satiric poem by Jonathan Swift. It was first published in 1731. One Wikipedia editor describes it like this: It features Corinna, “a young woman preparing for bed by deconstructing.” It’s awful, deeply sad, hilarious, and absolutely wonderful. Listen to Tom O’Bedlam’s narration:
Posted by Jesse Willis
One of the poems, The Window, in my recently acquired H.P. Lovecraft collection from Gollancz (Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany Of The Macabre) struck me as the perfect jumping off point for a thousand more Lovecraftian adventures. The book is really terrific. It features many wonderful illustrations by Les Edwards.
The poem itself is on page 324 unfortunately isn’t illustrated, but the text is available via Wikisource, and here it is from its publication in Weird Tales:
And here are a couple of readings found on YouTube:
The poem was also adapted to comics. It appeared in the Marvel Max series H.P. Lovecraft’s Haunt Of Horror (#3) – with art by Richard Corben:
Posted by Jesse Willis
I love introductions, afterwords, forewords. I buy collections of stories with stories I already have several copies of just for the new introductions, afterwords, and forewords. The only thing that’ll make me buy such a collection without a foreword, afterword, or introduction is if it has new illustrations.
And so one collection I’d love to get my mitts on is Barnes & Noble’s Edgar Allan Poe – Selected Poems & Tales which has both an introduction and new illustrations by Mark Summers!
I first heard about it via Neil Gaiman’s website. Gaiman wrote the introduction, Some Strangeness In The Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties Of Edgar Allan Poe, to the wonderful looking collection.
The entire inspiring essay is available over on Gaiman’s site.
Here are a few choice lines from it:
Poe isn’t for everyone. He’s too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.
Read the poems aloud. Read the stories aloud. Feel the way the words work in your mouth, the way the syllables bounce and roll and drive and repeat, or almost repeat. Poe’s poems would be beautiful if you spoke no English (indeed, a poem like “Ulalume” remains opaque even if you do understand English — it implies a host of meanings, but does not provide any solutions). Lines which, when read on paper, seem overwrought or needlessly repetitive or even mawkish, when spoken aloud reshape and reconfigure.
(You may feel peculiar, or embarrassed, reading aloud; if you would rather read aloud in solitude I suggest you find a secret place; or if you would like an audience, find someone who likes to be read to, and read to him or to her.)
And check out this illustration by Mark Summers (do you see the hidden skull?):
If you can’t see it, hit “Ctrl -” a few times.
And hey, my birthday is coming up people, and I don’t have this book!
Posted by Jesse Willis
I’m a shy visitor to the world of poetry. I find myself unable to even consider an approach to any given poem without some sort of tour guide, as it were. The latest such guide was an episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time in which Lyrical Ballads, a famous and influential collection of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, was discussed.
Of the many poems mentioned, one was entirely new to me – and that was We Are Seven by William Wordsworth. The guests’ discussion of it somehow reminded me of something – of what I’m not exactly sure – was it Harlan Ellison’s Jeffty Is Five? I don’t know – but I was reminded of something nonetheless. I think you may be too.
Here’s a snippet from the Wikipedia description of it:
“[We Are Seven] describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a ‘little cottage girl’ about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her. The poem turns on the question of whether to count two dead siblings.”
Have a listen for yourself, I found it rather haunting:
We Are Seven
By William Wordsworth; Read by Verity Kendall
1 |MP3| – Approx. 3 Minutes [POEM]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 27, 2012
First published in Lyrical Ballads, With A Few Other Poems.
Here’s the text itself:
We Are Seven by William Wordsworth
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage girl,
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That cluster’d round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad;
Her eyes were fair, and very fair,
—Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little maid,
“How many may you be?”
“How many? seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they, I pray you tell?”
She answered, “Seven are we,
“And two of us at Conway dwell,
“And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
“My sister and my brother,
“And in the church-yard cottage, I
“Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
“And two are gone to sea,
“Yet you are seven; I pray you tell
“Sweet Maid, how this may be?”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
“Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little maid,
“Your limbs they are alive;
“If two are in the church-yard laid,
“Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
“And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
“My ‘kerchief there I hem;
“And there upon the ground I sit—
“I sit and sing to them.
“And often after sunset, Sir,
“When it is light and fair,
“I take my little porringer,
“And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was little Jane;
“In bed she moaning lay,
“Till God released her of her pain,
“And then she went away.
“So in the church-yard she was laid,
“And all the summer dry,
“Together round her grave we played,
“My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
“And I could run and slide,
“My brother John was forced to go,
“And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you then,” said I,
“If they two are in Heaven?”
The little Maiden did reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
“Their spirits are in heaven!”
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
[Thanks also to Carmen H and Ruth Golding]
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and its author Stephen Greenblatt, are the subject of the latest CBC Ideas podcast. The Swerve is the story of the recovery of a lost epic Roman poem, by Titus Lucretius Carus, titled On The Nature Of Things – Greenblat makes the case for it being a work that changed the world, made it modern, by bringing ancient philosophy into an age ready for enlightenment. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. Host Paul Kennedy, as usual, shows that Canadian tax dollars can be used incredibly well when put in the right hands.
The poem in question is available as a LibriVox audiobook HERE.
And The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is available from Recorded Books (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini).
Here’s the book’s description:
Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature Of Things from certain oblivion.
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius – a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.
The copying and translation of this ancient book – the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age – fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare, and even Thomas Jefferson.
Here’s the |MP3|
Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml
Posted by Jesse Willis
Robert Sheckley was a joker, a satirist, a poker of fun at all of the silliness in life. But there’s something more going on in this short short story from 1953. Sure there’s the existentialist angle, and of course there’s the requisite Sheckley humor, but it’s the other quality in Beside Still Waters that makes this Sheckley story a bit different. You can see it right there in the title (taken from Psalm 23 of the Hebrew Bible), and you can see it in the Virgil Finlay’s illustration for the story too:
Beside Still Waters is an elegiac tale, offering only a cup of sadness to the reader, it’s the sort of story that Clifford D. Simak might have written. And that should be recommendation enough.
Beside Still Waters
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Frank Malanga
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 28, 2010
When people talk about getting away from it all, they are usually thinking about our great open spaces out west. But to science fiction writers, that would be practically in the heart of Times Square. When a man of the future wants solitude he picks a slab of rock floating in space four light years east of Andromeda. Here is a gentle little story about a man who sought the solitude of such a location. And who did he take along for company? None other than Charles the Robot. First published in Amazing Stories Oct.-Nov. 1953.
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And here’s the |PDF| I made from the original magazine publication.
Posted by Jesse Willis