Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet sequence written by Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet and courtier. It details the frustrated love of Astrophil (whose name means “star-lover”) for his beloved Stella (whose name means “star”). It is likely that Sidney based his poems on his own unrequited passion for a married woman. The sequence inspired other sonnet writers of the period, such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 11 recordings of To Sleep by Sir Philip Sidney. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 23, 2014. Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) was an English poet, courtier and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age.

volunteers bring you recordings of Double Sestina - Ye Goatherd Gods by Phillip Sidney. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for May 5, 2019. ------ Poem is included in the book "Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia" Ye Goatherd Gods" depicts the sorrows of two shepherds who love the same woman. She has left them both, however, and the two shepherds are dejected and heartbroken. They appeal to the gods, to nature, and to the heavens in their angst, and everything they see is altered because of their sorrows...

Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618) was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularising tobacco in England.Raleigh's poetry is written in the relatively straightforward, unornamented mode known as the plain style. C. S. Lewis considered Raleigh one of the era's "silver poets", a group of writers who resisted the Italian Renaissance influence of dense classical reference and elaborate poetic devices.In poems such as "What is Our Life" and "The Lie", Raleigh expresses a contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) attitude more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the dawning era of humanistic optimism...

In stunning narrative poetry, the story begins during the time when Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick has been hunted out of Scotland into exile by the English and their allies. Bruce returns over sea from the Island of Rachrin: but is forced to land close to hostile forces at Artonish Castle on the seacoast of Argylshire. Seeking refuge from tempestuous seas, Bruce begs shelter from Ronald, Lord of the Isles: inadvertently on the day of his marriage feast to the beautiful Edith of Lorn.Bruce's very...

Harold the Dauntless is a rhymed, romantic, narrative-poem by Sir Walter Scott. Written in 1817, it weaves together elements of popular English legends and folklore using dramatic themes.The poem recounts the exploits and the personal spiritual journey of a doubtful knight errant - Harold the son of Danish Count Witikind: who seeks to recover his lands and wed a suitable spouse.Fire-breathing Harold is as much a stranger to love as he is addicted to dangerous adventure: yet his own confrontations with the spirit-world shake his faith in supposed omnipotence of the traditional Norse pantheon...

The narrative poems in this collection are written by Sir Walter Scott - the well-known English poet and novelist. Each of these five poems are based loosely upon German ballads: rewritten in flowing English meter.The Chase - a.k.a. The Wild Huntsman - A profligate, noble-born keeper of the royal forest - avidly addicted to the pleasures of the hunt - cruelly uses and mistreats his fellow-men. One day God's messengers come to test him: executing sentence immediately in just proportion to the huntsman's responses...

Scott's The Bridal of Triermain is a rhymed, romantic, narrative poem which weaves together elements of popular English legend using dramatic themes. This beautiful poem celebrates the exploits of a knight errant - Sir Roland De Vaux - as he seeks to rescue (and hopefully espouse) a beautiful maiden, Gyneth. Gyneth is the illegitimate daughter of King Arthur: doomed by Merlin 500 years previously to an enchanted sleep inside a magic castle. The enchantment can only be broken by a rescuer both brave and noble enough to overcome the temptations used successively to distract and overcome him, namely: fear, wealth, pleasure and pride.(Introduction by Godsend)

The scene of the following Poem is laid chiefly in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the Western Highlands of Perthshire. The time of Action includes Six Days, and the transactions of each Day occupy a Canto.

This is the final installment in Sophocles's Theban Plays, following Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus's daughter Antigone deliberately breaks the laws of Thebes when she buries her brother's body and is sentenced to death. She clashes with Creon, the King of Thebes, over what constitutes justice and morality: the laws of the state or the laws of the individual.

Published in 1899, just a year before his death, War Is Kind by Stephen Crane evokes again the dark imagery of war which made his fortune in The Red Badge Of Courage. Unlike that book, this collection leaves the battlefield itself behind to explore the damage war does to people’s hearts and minds. Reeking of dashed hopes, simultaneously sympathetic with the victims of war and cynical about the purposes of war, Crane implicitly criticizes the image of the romantic hero and asks if Love can survive...

Written in a purgative frenzy of pure imagination , Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines is a strange, enigmatic, and sparsely-written collection of free verse that bristles with Old Testament fury, seethes with cosmic cynicism, and touches on themes of lost faith and existential terror. - Summary by ChuckW

Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “By the Waters of Babylon”. It was a line of Benét’s poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown’s famous history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

volunteers bring you 17 recordings of Music by Stephen Vincent Benét. This was the Weekly Poetry project for October 30, 2022. ------ Stephen Vincent Benét was from a family with roots in Florida, which explains the Spanish name. He attended Yale starting in 1915 and that same year published his first book of poems, `Five Men and Pompey'. `Young Adventure' is considered his first mature book of poetry, and he went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1929 for `John Brown's Body' and in 1944 for `Western Star'. )

Susan Coolidge was the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who is best known for her What Katy Did series. This is the first of three volumes of her verse.

Susan Coolidge was the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who is best known for her What Katy Did series. This is the second of three volumes of her verse.

Susan Coolidge was the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who is best known for her What Katy Did series. This is the last of three volumes of her verse. - Summary by Rachel

volunteers bring you 10 recordings of Christmas by Susan Coolidge. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for December 15, 2019. ------ Sarah Chauncey Woolsey was an American children's author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge. Woolsey worked as a nurse during the American Civil War , after which she started to write. She is best known for her classic children's novel What Katy Did . The fictional Carr family was modeled after her own, with Katy Carr inspired by Woolsey herself. - Summary by Wikipedia

volunteers bring you 7 recordings of After-Glow by Susan Coolidge . This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for July 25, 2021. ------ Sarah Chauncey Woolsey was an American children's author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge. Woolsey worked as a nurse during the American Civil War , after which she started to write. She is best known for her classic children's novel What Katy Did

'Roughing It In the Bush' is Susanna Moodie's account of how she coped with the harshness of life in the woods of Upper Canada, as an Englishwoman homesteading abroad. Her narrative was constructed partly as a response to the glowing falsehoods European land-agents were circulating about life in the New World. Her chronicle is frank and humorous, and was a popular sensation at the time of its publication in 1852.

volunteers bring you 19 recordings of The Pause by Susanna Moodie. This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 22, 2020. ------ Susanna Moodie was an English-born Canadian author who wrote about her experiences as a settler in Canada, which was a British colony at the time. This poem is taken from ENTHUSIASM AND OTHER POEMS, By SUSANNA STRICKLAND, - Summary by Wikipedia

volunteers bring you 26 recordings of A Canadian Song by Susanna Moodie.. This was the Weekly Poetry project for October 25, 2020. ------ Susanna Moodie was an English-born Canadian author who wrote about her experiences as a settler in Canada which was a British colony at the time. Here she celebrates the waterways of Canada. - Summary by Wikipedia

We have all had mysterious charges added on to our hotel bills. - Summary by David Lawrence

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was a British author, poet, journalist and friend of royalty. Thomas was a humanitarian who frequently wrote in his poems about the impoverished and sick and unemployed, especially caring about returned soldiers in the First World War. - Summary by Wikipedia

Written in the 14th century by the Gawain poet, 'Pearl' is an elegiac poem reflecting on the death of a young daughter, pictured as a pearl lost in a garden. It is considered a masterpiece of Middle English verse, incorporating both the older tradition of alliterative poetry as well as rhyme, centered around the development of an intricately structured image. Sophie Jewett's translation from the Northern dialect of the original renders much of the poem's liveliness and beauty accessible to modern readers, whilst encouraging them to pursue their reading further, to read the original itself.This recording is dedicated to the memory of Pearl Jean Shearman, 1914-2012.

A companion piece to From Jerusalem to Revelations in the catalogue . Pearl, believed to have been written by the author of the Pagano-Christian beheading tale, Gawain and the Green Knight, enters the vision of a grieving father at his daughter's graveside that carries him with us into the spirit world in which she finds her dwelling place now, a pure unspotted girl, her father's pride, now a Pearl of great price and her Saviour's bride. She chides him, much Beatrice does Dante in his Divine Comedy with the plain and incontrovertible fact that she now lives in the New Jerusalem in the rapture of eternal bliss, while he is wholly wrapped in his desire to be again with her...