A personal journey around the landscapes of British poetry
Programme Details
Sunday 13 March 4.30-5.00pm
Programme 4: Mountains
Photograph shows [left to right] Robert MacFarlane and Andrew Motion
About the programme
The mountains of the mind as well as those on a map. The sublime and the invention of mountains by romanticism. Our horror of them before the C18th. Intoxication of the peak and the quasi-fascist alp. Fog, effort, fear and ice. Their absence in England and English poets' scepticism about them
Contributors: Robert MacFarlane
Readers: Tom Courtenay, Kenneth Cranham, Iain Glen, Jamie Glover, Pete Postlethwaite, Simon Russell Beale.
Poems
'Sonnet: Written on Top of Ben Nevis' - Keats. Read by Tom Courtenay
Taken from 'The Poetical Works of John Keats' published by Oxford University Press.
Extract from 'The Prelude' - Wordsworth. Read by Kenneth Cranham
Taken from 'William Wordsworth: The Major Works' published by Oxford University Press
'No Worst' - Gerard Manley Hopkins. Read by Simon Russell Beale
Taken from 'Hopkins. Poems and Prose' Published by Everyman
Extract from 'The Prelude' - Wordsworth. Read by Kenneth Cranham
Taken from 'William Wordsworth: The Major Works' published by Oxford University Press.
Extract from 'Mont Blanc' - Shelley. Read by Jamie Glover
Taken from 'Shelley: Poetical Works.' Published by Oxford University Press
'High Hills' - Ivor Gurney. Read by Iain Glen
Taken from 'Selected Poems of Ivor Gurney' published by Oxford University Press
'On Wenlock Edge' - AE Housman. Read by Pete Postlethwaite
Taken from 'The Collected Poems of AE Housman' published by Jonathan Cape
'Mountains' - WH Auden. Read by Tom Courtenay
Taken from 'Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957' Published by Oxford University Press
Send us your comments
Here are some of the poems which evoked mountains for our listeners.
stuart olesker, Southsea 'Rocky Acres' by that fine poet - and climber (with Mallory) - Robert Graves, evokes both a physical and metaphysical terrain to memorable effect. It is neither sentimental nor cynical, but a powerful statement of a poet laying claim to his own landscape and uncompromisingly rejecting the easy and comfortable way.
Helen Hartquist One of my favorites is a poem by Pamela Cranston written about climbing a mountian in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, called: "Coming To Treeline".
Liz Haden Grey County, Ontario, Canada "David" by Dr. Earle Birney - read to our grade 6/age 11 class in a darkened classroom accompanied by a slideshow of our teacher's summer hiking holiday in the Rocky Mountains gave me a chilling sense of awe that's never left me. My brothers both hike and climb the Rocky Mountains. Should their lives end there...they will end in a certain bliss.
William Hird, Leeds For me a favourite poem about mountains and moorland would be Emily Bronte's which starts 'Loud without the wind was roaring/ through the waned autunmnal sky...' with its later repeated lines 'For the moors, for the moors...'
stuart olesker, Southsea
'Rocky Acres' by that fine poet - and climber (with Mallory) - Robert Graves, evokes both a physical and metaphysical terrain to memorable effect. It is neither sentimental nor cynical, but a powerful statement of a poet laying claim to his own landscape and uncompromisingly rejecting the easy and comfortable way.
Helen Hartquist
One of my favorites is a poem by Pamela Cranston written about climbing a mountian in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, called: "Coming To Treeline".
Liz Haden Grey County, Ontario, Canada
"David" by Dr. Earle Birney - read to our grade 6/age 11 class in a darkened classroom accompanied by a slideshow of our teacher's summer hiking holiday in the Rocky Mountains gave me a chilling sense of awe that's never left me. My brothers both hike and climb the Rocky Mountains. Should their lives end there...they will end in a certain bliss.
William Hird, Leeds
For me a favourite poem about mountains and moorland would be Emily Bronte's which starts 'Loud without the wind was roaring/ through the waned autunmnal sky...' with its later repeated lines 'For the moors, for the moors...'