Alec Guinness reading 'Journey of the Magi'

For those who don't know the connection between Star Wars and T.S. Eliot...

Here is a reading of Journey of the Magi by the English actor Alec Guinness. He can also be heard in a famous recording of Eliot's Four Quartets. He has quite an old style of delivery, but full of subtlety and delicate feeling for nuance. 

Alec Guinness is one of Britain's greatest stage and screen actors. He was a favourite of the director David Lean, who gave him star roles in his 1940's cinema adaptations of Dickens' Oliver Twist (playing Fagin) and Great Expectations (as Herbert Pocket), as well as the epic Doctor Zhivago. Then came fame for a new generation of cinema goers when he played the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first ever Star Wars film released in 1977. 

Click on the video link below to hear the poem:

Journey of the Magi - T. S. Eliot

Happy Christmas to all visitors!

 Whatever our beliefs, we can hardly fail to be moved and simply struck by the greatness of T.S. Eliot's poem Journey of the Magi, published in 1927. It is a monument of Modernist poetry, a monologue by one of the Magi journeying from Palestine to visit the newborn Christ-child; a story of alienation, pain, exile, and curious homecoming where nothing can be as before. The Modernists wanted to break with tradition in the early 20th century, but it could never happen entirely. Eliot was one of the many Modernists whose culture embraced hundreds of years of Western tradition, which he reworked and integrated in brilliantly original ways; in free verse, modern existential questioning,  and an idiosyncratic conversational tone combined with lofty poetic speech. Here is the complete text:

Yeats, the last Romantic?

Can't resist, it's Yeats again! I have loved for so long the magnificent poem "Coole Park and Ballylee 1931", which is a tribute to his Patron, Lady Gregory, written during the last months of her final illness. Coole Park is her estate, a grand ancestral house in Ireland, and her decline and death coincide, for Yeats, with the demise of wider traditions, including romanticism. The line "We were the last romantics", so simple, resounds in the heart and mind, and stays there. Here is the final verse:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Because the theme recently has been country folk, and because in class at the moment we are looking at the Romantics, I thought it a good idea to post an extract from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a seminal piece of writing which has come to be regarded as a kind of 'manifesto' for the Romantic poets - although they did not think of themselves in terms of a distinct movement of that name at the time. 

Wendell Berry on the Land

Following on from thoughts of enclosure, Hardy's England, and country folk...Here is an interesting essay, from the other side of the Pond, by the remarkable Kentucky farmer, essayist, thinker, ecologist and poet, Wendell Berry. He is regarded by many as a visionary, but with his farmer's feet firmly on the ground. And he speaks his mind, which I like a lot. Click on the link below:

Hilaire Belloc's 'Tarantella'

Hilaire Belloc, who wrote The Servile State quoted in the post below, was a popular poet in his day, and is famous for collections for children, including The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts (for Worse Children), The Modern Traveller and Cautionary Tales for Children.

When I was child, I was given this poem at school, 'Tarantella', to learn by heart and recite in front of the class. I remember the sensation distinctly; I think it was the first time I really connected with poetry, because it is so musical, almost incantatory, and the rhythm in the middle part so vigorously expresses the movements of dance. I loved it, and still do!

Thomas Hardy's country folk on the roads

Following on from the last post on the gradual privatisation of England's land, and the resulting dispossession, here is the opening to Hardy's great novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' in which the protagonist Michael Henchard,  and his wife and child, are walking the country roads in search of seasonal work. The turnip-hoer they encounter relates how the village Weydon-Priors is on the decline, its houses being pulled down due to economic forces beyond their control. It is typical Hardy; a melancholic autumnal setting, estranged people, here an estranged couple, small dimished human activity on a backdrop of grand natural forces at work since the dawn of time. 

The Land Grab (suite)

In the post below, on the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, I spoke of the traumatic effect on the inhabitants of rural England of the accelerated privatisation of the Common Land of the country. John Clare himself never got over this, and some of his most moving poems were written in response. This process of Enclosure gathered pace in the eighteenth century, and later, in the Victorian Age, the novelist Thomas Hardy would depict and lament the situation of the rapid disintegration of rural communities and their ancient customs, which came about when country folk were thrown off the land. In Hardy's novels, it is common to see people walking the country roads in search of seasonal employment and habitation. Yet this process began much earlier...