81 Famous Poems Book

Audio Partners | 1992 | ISBN: 0945353650 | Audio CD | mp3 | 61,9 MB

Listen to the sound of English as it was meant to be heard. This collection of timeless
British and American poems is an experience to be treasured. The readings, by brilliant
classic actors Alexander Scourby, Nancy Wickwire, and Bramwell Fletcher, are presented
in the order they appear in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition, and are
selected for their ability to delight. The poetry is also among the most anthologized verse
in the English language. Included are such best loved works as Shakespeare's "Shall I
Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?," John Donne's "Go and Catch a Falling Star," Robert
Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," Robert Burns' "A Red, Red Rose,"
John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain, My Captain," and
William Butler Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole" - a total of 81 major poems from 39
poets. It is simply a collection of the best.
01. Anonymous Early Song: The Cuckoo Song
02. Sir Thomas Wyatt: Whoso List to Hunt
03. Sir Walter Raleigh: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
04. Sir Walter Raleigh: The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
05. Sir Philip Sidney: Sonnet 1 from Astrophel and Stella
06. Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
07. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
08. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 29 - When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
09. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds
10. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 129 - Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
11. Thomas Campion: When to Her Lute Corina Sings
12. Thomas Campion: Rose-cheeked Laura
13. Thomas Campion: There is a Garden in Her Face
14. John Dunne: Song - Go and catch a falling star
15. John Dunne: The Sun Rising
16. John Dunne: Sonnet 10 from Holy Sonnets - Death, be not proud
17. Ben Johnson: Song: To Celia
18. Robert Herrick: The Argument of His Book
19. Robert Herrick: Delight in Disorder
20. Robert Herrick: To the Virgins to Make Much of Time
21. Robert Herrick: Upon Julia's Clothes
22. George Herbert: The Collar
23. George Herbert: The Pulley
24. George Herbert: Love (III)
25. John Milton: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (a.k.a. On His Blindness)
26. John Suckling: Song - Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
27. John Suckling: Out upon It! (aka The Constant Lover)
28. Richard Lovelace: To Althea, from Prison
29. Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
30. Andrew Marvell: The Definition of Love
31. Henry Vaughan: The Retreat
32. John Dryden: A Song for St. Cecilia's Day

33. Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

34. William Blake: from Poetical Sketches, Song
35. William Blake: from Songs of Innocence, Introduction
36. William Blake: from Songs of Innocence, The Lamb
37. William Blake: from Songs of Experience, The Tyger
38. Robert Burns: To Mouse
39. Robert Burns: A Red, Red Rose
40. William Wordsworth: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
41. William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
42. William Wordsworth: My Heart Leaps Up
43. William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much With Us
44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan CD-2
01. George Gordon, Lord Byron: She Walks in Beauty
02. George Gordon, Lord Byron: When We Two Parted
03. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
04. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind
05. Percy Bysshe Shelley: To a Skylark
06. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Adonais (stanzas 1, 39, 54, and 55)
07. John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
08. John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn
09. John Keats: Bright Star
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Concord Hymn
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Rhodora
12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese: 1, 43
13. Edgar Allan Poe: To Helen
14. Edgar Allan Poe: The City in the Sea
15. Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee
16. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Break, Break, Break
17. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Songs from The Princess, The Splendor Falls
18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Tears, Idle Tears
19. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
20. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Eagle
21. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar
22. Robert Browning: My Last Duchess
23. Robert Browning: Home-Thoughts from Abroad
24. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself (parts 1, 6, 21 and 31)
25. Walt Whitman: O Captain! My Captain!
26. Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
27. Emily Dickinson: 303 - The Soul selects her own Society
28. Emily Dickinson: 986 - A narrow Fellow in the Grass
29. Christina Rossetti: Up-Hill
30. Algernon Charles Swinburne: The Garden of Proserpine
31. Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
32. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty
33. Alfred Edward Housman: Lovliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
34. Alfred Edward Housman: With Rue My Heart Is Laden

35. William Butler Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

36. William Butler Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole
///////////////////////////////
1. Cuckoo Song
SUMER is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu
Sing cuccu!
5
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu: 10
Ne swike thu naver nu;
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!
Whoso List to Hunt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas! I may no more.
The vain travail hath worried me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means, my worried mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain;
And graven in diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame."
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

IF all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;

And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.
The Passionate Mans Pilgrimage
BY SIR WALTER RALEGH
[Supposed to be written by one at the point of death]
Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hopes true gage,
And thus Ill take my pilgrimage.
Blood must be my bodys balmer,
No other balm will there be given,
Whilst my soul, like a white palmer,
Travels to the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
And there Ill kiss
The bowl of bliss,
And drink my eternal fill
On every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before,

But after it will neer thirst more;

And by the happy blissful way
More peaceful pilgrims I shall see,
That have shook off their gowns of clay,
And go apparelled fresh like me.
Ill bring them first
To slake their thirst,
And then to taste those nectar suckets,
At the clear wells
Where sweetness dwells,
Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets.
And when our bottles and all we
Are filld with immortality,
Then the holy paths well travel,
Strewd with rubies thick as gravel,
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral, and pearl bowers.
From thence to heavens bribeless hall
Where no corrupted voices brawl,
No conscience molten into gold,
Nor forgd accusers bought and sold,
No cause deferrd, nor vain-spent journey,
For there Christ is the kings attorney,
Who pleads for all without degrees,
And he hath angels, but no fees.
When the grand twelve million jury
Of our sins and sinful fury,
Gainst our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death, and then we live.
Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader,
Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder,
Thou movest salvation even for alms,
Not with a bribed lawyers palms.
And this is my eternal plea
To him that made heaven, earth, and sea,
Seeing my flesh must die so soon,
And want a head to dine next noon,
Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread,
Set on my soul an everlasting head.
Then am I ready, like a palmer fit,
To tread those blest paths which before I writ.
Sir Philip Sidney
Astrophel and Stella

I
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.
SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
SONNET 29
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 116: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds...
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 129 Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
When to Her Lute Corinna Sings
BY THOMAS CAMPION
When to her lute Corinna sings,

Her voice revives the leaden strings,

And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear;
But when she doth of mourning speak,
Evn with her sighs the strings do break.
And as her lute doth live or die,
Let by her passion, so must I:
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring,
But if she doth of sorrow speak,
Evn from my heart the strings do break.
Rose-Cheeked Laura
BY THOMAS CAMPION
Rose-cheek'd Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed;
Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renew'd by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in themSelves eternal.