ThomasWhichello

Recorded in January 2022. "Probably written between 30 Oct. 1806 and Jan. 1807." (Jones 1987:165). The French (under Menard) first invaded Switzerland in 1798. Napoleon then invaded the country a second time in 1802. Of this latter incident, Wordsworth writes: "After Buonaparte had violated the Independence of Switzerland, my heart turned against him." (Letter to Losh, 1821.) Coleridge considers this poem to be "one of the noblest sonnets in our language" (The Friend, 21 Dec. 1809), and Wordsworth calls it one of the best he had ever written. (Letter to Richard Sharp, 27 September 1808).

Recorded in January 2022. From "The King of Terrors," a sermon preached at St Paul's Cathedral on Sunday, the 15th of May, 1910. "The sermon was preached following the death of King Edward VII, whose coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall from 17 to 19 May, where it was viewed by about a quarter of a million people." Further on in the sermon, Scott Holland makes the following interesting remarks on the feeling that "Death is nothing at all": "Our high mood was real, though it passes. It was a true experience; it gave us authentic intelligence. We were better able to win an insight into the real heart of things as we stood there by the bedside of the dead in spiritual exaltation, with every capacity raised to its highest level, than now, when we are drawn under the drag of days, submerged, unnerved, wearied, out of spirits, disheartened. Therefore it is our reasonable act of faith to stand by our highest experience, and to assert its validity even when its light has faded out of our lives and we have sunk back under the shadows. Though we have returned to the twilight of the valleys, yet we will ever recall the moment when we stood upon the sunlit heights and saw the far horizons. It was a true value that we then gave to life and death. That act of insight cannot be disproved or discredited; even though there be a counter judgement which will not be gainsaid, and which still presses its conclusion and penetrating insistence."

Recorded in January 2022. Written in November 1929. This poem is very curious, as being an extremely rare species of sonnet written in the horror genre. It also tells a self-contained and effective short story within an incredibly small number of words. There is a quintessentially Lovecraftian tone in it, and it seems, as it were, to be a representation of the author's works in miniature. Lovecraft went on to write an entire cycle of horror-sonnets, containing thirty-six poems, called “Fungi from Yuggoth.” The history of this poem is as follows: The protagonist of H. P. Lovecraft’s famous story “The Call of Cthulhu” is Henry Wilcox, who lives at the Fleur-de-Lys building at 7 Thomas Street. "Now Bernard K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, and author of a regular column, ‘The Sideshow,’ read the story in an anthology, and was astounded to find that Wilcox’s residence and his own were one and the same. Feigning offence, he vowed in his column of 30 November, 1929, to send a ghost to Lovecraft’s home at 3 a. m. to scare him: Lovecraft promptly wrote the poem ‘The Messenger’ at 3:07 a. m. that night. Hart published the poem in his column of 3 December." (Joshi and Schultz 2001:29). These are Hart's words: "I shall not be happy until, joining league with wraiths and ghouls, I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon [Lovecraft's] own doorstep in Barnes street... I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor dissonance every morning at 3 o'clock sharp, with a clinking of chains." Lovecraft, however, knowing that obscurity is the mother of horror, alludes, in excellent taste, not to a ghost, but to an indefinite "thing." The judgement of a notable literary critic is interesting to consider. “Winfield Townley Scott, he who had referred to the bulk of Lovecraft’s verse as ‘eighteenth-century rubbish’—calls The Messenger ‘perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem he ever wrote.’” (Joshi 1996:462). The music is "Tormented Souls" by Myuu.