Sir Andrew Motion on William Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Sir Andrew Motion reads one of his favourite poems, William Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways".
He proceeds the reading with a short description of why the poem means so much to him, and follows it with a story of how much such poems can come to strengthen us when we are at our most vulnerable.
For Sir Andrew, the last line is "one of the greatest and one of the simplest lines of all English poetry."
"[It] registers a devastating loss, but admits as it does so, that any more comprehensive account of grief is impossible. It is a very beautiful lyric built on solid ground, [...] but built above a huge subterranean cavern of silence."
This is an extract from the lecture 'Resetting the Human Compass: The Use and Value of the Arts' which was given as a part of the 2012 City of London Festival. The full hour-long lecture be accessed on the Gresham College website here:
www.gresham.ac....
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There is currently nearly 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website.
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The poem in the context of the anecdote really brings it to life.
Tin ear. He completely misses the basic iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter of the last two lines by putting the accents in the wrong places, contra the following:
But SHE is IN her GRAVE, and O
The DIFFereENCE to ME.
+Iain Rob I tend to think that the blending of the emotional and intellectual facets in the act of performance has the potential to edify the human.
Would you prefer the lines were read accompanied by a metronome? This could be easily achieved with a cheap mixing programme. Iain, your system of spelling could provide the input for the software.
A metronome certainly might help the general public to do such a perfectly simple thing as to read metre accurately.
+Iain Robb My favourite poets are Thomas Shadwell, Colley Cibber, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas Warton, William McGonagall and Alfred Austin.
He doesn't miss it, he just doesn't hammer it. IP would be a dry and odd thing indeed if readers bounced metronomically along every line.
Ok boomer