Recorded while hiking up the Squaw Peak trail again, in a spot with lots of wind and hence the distracting and omnipresent wind noise. Still, an awesome poem that you probably haven't head before because it's a translation from a fragment of an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) manuscript.
TEXT OF POEM:
“Wulf”
Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland
Prey, it’s as if my people have been handed prey.
They’ll tear him to pieces if he comes with a troop.
O, we are apart.
Wulf is on one island, I on another,
a fastness that island, a fen-prison.
fierce men roam there, on that island;
they’ll tear him to pieces if he comes with a troop.
O, we are apart.
How I have grieved for my Wulf’s wide wanderings.
When rain slapped the earth and I sat apart weeping,
when the bold warrior wrapped his arms around me,
I seethed with desire and yes with such hatred.
Wulf, my Wulf, my yearning for you
and your seldom coming have caused my sickness,
my mourning heart, not mere starvation.
Can you hear, Eadwacer? Wulf will spirit
our pitiful whelp to the woods.
Men easily savage what was never secure,
our song together.
Episode 4.17 Kay Ryan’s “This Life”
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
Episode 309: Karl Shapiro's "Interlude III"
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