Debates

This links in the list of debates published in Connotations will take you to an entrance page for each debate on which all the contributions in the respective debate are listed and linked. The debates below are listed in chronological order of the primary text they deal with.

‘Vancouver Walking’: Contemporary Canadian Urban Poetry

"Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization"

"New Alchimie": Reading John Donne's "Nocturnall" Through Poems by Kimberly Johnson and Alice Fulton

"Single Nature's Double Name": Some Comments on The Phoenix and Turtle

"The Road Not Taken" in Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

"The road to happiness": Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

(Re-)Telling Aesopic fables in the 21st century

(Un-)Surprise in Alice

A Sentimental Journey: Lost in Translation

Colin Clout's Homecoming: The Imaginative Travels of Edmund Spenser

De Doctrina Christiana and Milton

Dracula and the Idea of Europe

If and It in Shakespeare

Lolita's Sources

Macbeth and Problems of Identity

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Piers Plowman

Silas Marner as Quasi-religious Text

The Faerie Queene as Satirical Intertext

The Family Reunion: Eliot, James, and the Buried Life

The Secret Garden and Wuthering Heights

The Tempest in the Trivium

Titus Andronicus in the Early Eighteenth Century

A Bakhtinian Take on Conversational Modes in Poetry

A Good Natured Warning: Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno'

A Reading of George Herbert's "Heaven"

A Visitation of Kipling's Daemon?

A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects

Adaptations and the Initiating Text

Advertising and Vindicating Eighteenth-Century Novels

Agency in Vaughan's Sacred Poetry

Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George III

Alfred Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar"

Ambiguity and Ethics in Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns

Ambiguity and the Poets

An Introduction to Metagenre

Textual and Other Reasons for Canonicity

Anne Fine, Goggle-Eyes

Anthologizing Shakespeare‘s Sonnets

Anthony Burgess's Shakespeare and "fin de siècle" Conceptions of Genius

Arthur Golding's Translation of Ovid

Arthur Kopit's The Hero in Context

Artistic Rivalry Over Classes and Countries

Artists as Parents

Assessments of the Urban Experience: Toni Morrison's Jazz and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Ben Jonson's Dramaturgy of Procreation

Between Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth

Blending Genres in Sidney's Arcadia

Byron's Procreative Poetry

C. S. Lewis's Complex Relationship with Queer Milton Studies

Carnival and the Grotesque in Ben Jonson's Plays

Catholic Shakespeare?

Character Names in The Winter's Tale

Charles Talbut Onions and the Oxford English Dictionary

Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, Nature and the Sublime

Chasing Possibilities in "The Jolly Corner"

Chinese Diaspora Writing

Christmas as Humbug: A Manuscript Poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon ('L. E. L.')

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II

Class, Race, and Sexuality in John Gray's Park

Clones, Doubles and What’s in Between

Close Reading Donne

Competing Discourses in The Winter's Tale

Concepts of Honor in Shakespeare

Conrad, Capitalism and Decay

Contemporary Perspectives on Verse Drama

Conversation and the Poetics of Modernism

Conversation in Celan's Poetry

Criminality and Detection in Eric Ambler's The Siege of the Villa Lipp

Crucifixion Imagery in Paradise Lost

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year

Decadence and Renewal in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend

Defoe and "The Other"

Dickens and Colour

Dickens and the Comic Extraneous

Dickens' A Christmas Carol: Revisiting and Reformation

Discourse in Pinter

Disenfranchisement and Diegesis in David Goodis

Doctor Faustus and His Books

Don Juan Between the Cultures: Derek Walcott and Tirso de Molina

Donald Barthelme as Disgruntled Liberal

Donne's Anniversaries: Matter and Spirit, Body and Soul, Time and Eternity

Donne's Sermons as Re-enactments of the Word

Drama and Stage Design in the Stuart Masque

Dylan Thomas: Place, Voice, Rebirth

E. K., A Spenserian Lesson in Reading

Edward Taylor's Poetry

Edwin Muir's Chorus of the Newly Dead and its Analogues

Ekphrastic Poetry and the Black Atlantic

Elegance and Poetic Economy

Elizabeth Bishop: Language, Gender, Class

Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Prodigal'

Elizabethan Drama and the Seasons

Ellipsis in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Emerson and Milton

Empirical Readings of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"

Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion

Evelyn Waugh's Humanism in A Handful of Dust

Falconbridge in Shakespeare's King John

Faulkner and Race

Faulkner and Racial Mythology

Faulkner and Racism

Faulkner and the Problematics of Procreation

Formal Limitations in Golden Age Villanelles

From Poetry to the Novel

Gary Snyder's Sense of Place

Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame

Geoffrey Household's Thrillers

George Herbert and Nature

George Orwell's Style and his Politics

Gerald Manley Hopkins Revisiting Binsey

Ghosts and Resurrections in Hardy, Joyce and Beyond

Grotesque Mythology: Faulkner's The Hamlet

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Concept of Divine Womanhood

Hawthorne and Poetic Economy

Henry James's The Jolly Corner

Henry James's Turn of the Screw as Tragedy

Henry Vaughan's "Isaac's Marriage"

Herman Melville and Christian Grabbe: A Source for "The Godhead is Broken"

Herman Melville and Cosmopolitanism

Historical Fetters and Creative Liberation in Shakespeare

Homosexuality in John Milton's Paradise Lost

Hopkins and Home

Hopkins's Portraits of the Artist

How to Have a Conversation with Gertrude Stein

Identity Politics in Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Plays

Image and Imagism

Interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan's "Notes from the Body"

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Jane Hirshfield and Modernism

Joe Orton's Laodicean Tragedy: The Good and Faithful Servant

John Dryden's Concept of Poetry and Imitation

John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure: An Aesthetics of Textual Surprise

John Lyly and the Most Misread Speech in Shakespeare

John Lyly's Poetic Economy

John Marston's The Malcontent

Joyce Carol Oates and Thomas Mann

Joyce Carol Oates's "By the River"

Kazuo Ishiguro and Tom Stoppard

Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice

Len Deighton’s Political Skepticism in The Ipcress File

Lindsey Collen's The Rape of Sita

Literary Allusions and Poetic Economy

Literature and Cliché

Literature and Mnemology

Lost and Found: Textual and Intertextual Retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Exhumation Letters and the ‘Willowwood‘ Sonnets

Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal

Love, not-love and “amor Dei” in George Herbert’s “Affliction (I)”

Maria's Riddle in Twelfth Night

Marx’s scholia: Annotations Involving Classical and Renaissance Texts in Capital

Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist

Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey

Medieval Visions of the Other World

Medievalist Perspectives on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Melville's Pierre

Meta-Epic Reflection in Twenty-First-Century Rewritings of Homer, or: The Meta-Epic Novel

Metafictional Discourse in Early American Literature

Miles Franklin's My Career Goes Bung

Milton and the Restoration

Milton's Astronomy

Mnemonics and Renaissance Literature

Motives for Rhetoric and Action in Troilus and Cressida

Mourning Place in Pastoral Elegy

Music and Literature in Conversation

Music as Textual Principle in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Myth and Language - Mythos and Logos in Emily Dickinson

Myth in The Soft Machine of W. S. Burroughs

Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre

Naming und Unnaming in Spenser

Narrative Techniques and the Fragmented Hero in Mary Shelley and Théophile Gautier

New Intertexts for David Dabydeen’s “Turner”

Prefaces

Old England and Shakespeare's Nostalgia

On English-Canadian Literary Criticism

On the Reception of Poetry

On Writing in Second Person

Oppositions in Thomas Heywood's The English Traveller

P. G. Wodehouse and Arthurian Legend

Paradise Remembered in Poems and Paintings

Parodies of Six-Word Stories: A Comic Literary Metagenre

Parody as Cultural Memory in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2

Parody—and Self-Parody in David Mamet

Parody, Paradox and Play in The Importance of Being Earnest

Parody, Satire and Sympathy in Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels

Paronomasia from Sidney to Herbert

Paronomasia in the Poems of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop

Paterson, Plath and Dante

Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude

Patterns of Antonomasia in Shakespeare

Pauline Smith's Short Stories

Perspective, Vision and Memory: Mountain-Climbing in Literature

Perversions and Reversals of Childhood and Old Age in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron

Peter Ackroyd's English Music

Peter Martyr and his Translator Richard Eden - Reading Culture in Translation

Philip Roth, Authorship and Death

Poe-tic Economy

Poe's Detective Dupin as Mythological Figure

Poetic (In-)Justice and the Law

Poetic Economy in English Haiku

Poetic Economy: Redundancy and Ellipsis

Poetic form and function in George Herbert's "Deniall" and Henry Vaughan's "Disorder and frailty"

Poetic Insertions in The Lord of the Rings

Poetic Justice

Poetics and Conversation

Poetry and Poeticity in Joyce, Baudelaire and Amichai

Poetry in Daniel Deronda

Poetry in Fiction

Poetry in Kipling's Short Fiction

Poetry in Poe

Polygeneric Narration in Atwood's Penelopiad

Pope's Ombre Enigmas in The Rape of the Lock

Possible Stories in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

Post-WWII Japanese-American Narrative: David Mura

Poverty Studies and Contemporary Indian Literature

Procreation, Communication and Incarnation in Sidney and Wordsworth

On Puzzling Shakespeare

Pynchon Takes the Fork in the Road

Quixotic Exceptionalism: Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote de la Mancha

Re-Evaluating Alan Bennett

Re-Reading M.M. Mahood's Shakespeare's Wordplay

Re-Reading Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer and the American Myth of a Republic

Reading Yang Mu's The Skeptic

Reason in English Renaissance Humanism: Starkey, More and Ascham

Rebuilding Africa - A Myth and its Rewriting

Recent Responses to Shakespeare's Non-Dramatic Verse

Religion in King John

Religious Literary Style in Milton's Paradise Lost

Renegotiating Scottish Identity in the Pilgrim Narrative of William Lithgow

Restoration She-Tragedy: Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved

Resurrection as Blasphemy

Revisitings and Repetitions in Beckett's Later Works

Richard McCoy's The Rites of Knighthood

Richard Savage's The Wanderer: A Vision

Riddles of Procreation

Robert Frost's Conversational Style

Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour"

Sandra Billington's Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama

Self-Imposed Fetters: The Productivity of Formal and Thematic Restrictions

Sensory Perception and Literary Images in Edgar Allan Poe

Shakespeare and New Historicism

Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in Nabokov's Pale Fire

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in an Irish Context

Shakespeare's Falstaff as Parody

Shakespeare's Lost Code: Tracing Mythology in Hamlet

Shakespeare's Ovid and Arthur Golding

Shakespeare's Scruple of Gold

Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Christian Premises

Spenser and Ireland

Spenser as Prometheus: The Monstrous and the Idea of Poetic Creation

Spenser's Parody

Staging Dissent in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Sujata Bhatt's "The Hole in the Wind"

Surprises in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

T.H. White's The Once And Future King

Tennyson’s “Tithonus” and the Revision of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”

Textual, Contextual and Critical Surprises in "Désirée's Baby"

The American Adam in Mailer and Didion

The American Carnival of The Great Gatsby

The Arthurian Legend in Graham Swift's Last Orders

The Author's Name as an Object of Paronomasia

The Character of Lucius in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

The Conversationalists and Literature

The Country House Poem Revisited

The Economy of Literary Interpretation

The End of Editing Shakespeare

The Essays of Storm Janeson

The Ethics of Otherness in Ian McEwan's Saturday

The Ghost Visitations of Lew Welch and the Art of Zen Failure

The Historical Context of John Ford's Plays

The Inhuman Non-Human in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin

The Last Moments of Hamlet

The Loss of the Artist's Agency

The Mysterious Genesis of Paradise Lost

The Myth of the Self in Whitman and Traherne

The Narrator of Conrad's Under Western Eyes

The Opening of All's Well That Ends Well

The Origins of the English Laureate Micro-Epic

The Pivotal Position of Henry V in the Rise and Fall of Shakespeare's Prose

The Place Revisited in T. S. Eliot

The Poetics of Alice Oswald's Memorial

The Poetics of Conversation in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

The Politics and Poetics of Robert Lowell

The Politics of Mucedorus

The Re-representation of African Identity in Kojo B. Laing's Fiction

The Reader in Fielding

The Reception History of C. S. Lewis's "A Preface to Paradise Lost"

The Republican Imagination in Eighteenth-Century America

The Return of the Dead in Margaret Atwood's Fiction

The Search for F. P. Greve/Grove

The Search for the Holy Grail

The Sepulchral City Revisited: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The Theological Background of Twelfth Night 4.2

The Titles of George Herbert's Poems

The Unworthy Servant in Milton's Sonnet 19

The Vertue of Spectacle in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

The Woman Taken in Adultery: A Literary Perspective on Christ’s Writing in John 8:1-12

Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Persephone

Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness

Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies

Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1966-)

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Toothpicks in Literature

Tragedy and Trauerspiel: John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi

Trauma, Writing and Simulated Orality in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Tropes of Falling, Rising, Standing in Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle

Understanding (through) Annotations

Unscrambling Surprises in Faulkner's Stories

Verse Satire: Its Form, Genre and Mode

Vladimir Nabokov and the Surprise of Poetry

W. B. Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter"

Walcott's Concept of Mythic History

Wallace Stevens and Mesoamerican Mythology

Was The Raigne of King Edward III a Compliment to Lord Hunsdon?

Wharton's Hudson River Bracketed and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

What is the Dream in Midsummer Night's Dream?

Who was the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnet 86?

Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting"

Willi Erzgräber's Studies in Modernism

William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham

William Godwin's Political Justice v. His Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft

William Harmon's "1943"

Wodehouse and the Baroque

Wodehouse Linguist?

Wodehouse Parodist

Wordplay in William Carlos Williams's Poetry

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

Wordsworth's social critique and "The Baker's Cart"

Yeats and Indian Philosophy

Youth, Race and Nation in Colin MacInnes's Novels

Revisiting Halberstadt

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“While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night“
by Nahum Tate and Alan Gray

Sung by The Seminar “Music and Poetry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England“

WHILE shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.

‘Fear not,’ said he (for mighty dread
Had seized their troubled mind);

‘Glad tidings of great joy I bring
To you and all mankind.

‘To you in David’s town this day
Is born of David’s line
A Saviour, who is Christ the Lord;
And this shall be the sign:

The heavenly Babe you there shall find
To human view displayed,
All meanly wrapped in swathing bands,
And in a manger laid.’

Thus spake the seraph; and forthwith
Appeared a shining throng
Of angels praising God, who thus
Addressed their joyful song:

‘All glory be to God on high,
And on the earth be peace;
Good-will henceforth from heaven to men
Begin and never cease.’

From Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott

Read by Capucine Blanc; Sung by Louise Neubronner

THE JUNGFRAU TO BETH

God bless you, dear Queen Bess!

May nothing you dismay,

But health and peace and happiness

Be yours, this Christmas day.

Here’s fruit to feed our busy bee,

And flowers for her nose.

Here’s music for her pianee,

An afghan for her toes,

A portrait of Joanna, see,

By Raphael No. 2

Who laboured with great industry

To make it fair and true.

Accept a ribbon red, I beg,

For Madam Purrer’s tail,

And ice cream made by lovely Peg,

A Mont Blanc in a pail.

Their dearest love my makers laid

Within my breast of snow.

Accept it, and the Alpine maid,

From Laurie and from Jo.

From A Child’s Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas

Read by Julia Schatz

…One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town…

From Vincent
by Tim Burton

Read by Gero Guttzeit

…Her anger now spent, she walked out through the hall
And while Vincent backed slowly against the wall
The room started to swell, to shiver and creak
His horrid insanity had reached its peak

…

He saw Abercrombie, his zombie slave
And heard his wife call from beyond the grave
She spoke from her coffin and made ghoulish demands
While, through cracking walls, reached skeleton hands

…

Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams
Swept his mad laughter to terrified screams!
To escape the madness, he reached for the door
But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor…

From the Cider with Rosie
by Laurie Lee

Read by Laurie Atkinson

Illustration by Mark Hearld, in Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (London: Vintage, 2014), p. 138

The week before Christmas, when the snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like hay-making, blackberrying, stone-clearing and wishing-people-a- happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks. By instinct we knew just when to begin it; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognised it and were ready…

Illustration by Mark Hearld, in Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (London: Vintage, 2014), p. 138

From A Good Man is Hard to Find
by Flannery O’Connor

Read by Curtis Runstedler

Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus. Jesus,“ meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing. “Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus shown everything off balance…

“In Memoriam [Ring out, wild Bells]“
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Read by Amanda Vernon

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

FromThe Wind in The Willows
by Kenneth Grahame

Read by Robert McColl

Villagers all, this frosty tide,
Let your doors swing open wide,
Though wind may follow, and snow beside,
   Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;
      Joy shall be yours in the morning!

Here we stand in the cold and the sleet,
Blowing fingers and stamping feet,
Come from far away you to greet–
   You by the fire and we in the street–
      Bidding you joy in the morning!

“It Came Upon The Midnight Clear“
by Edmund Sears (Text) and Arthur Sullivan (Melody)

Sung by The Seminar “Music and Poetry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England“

IT came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
‘Peace on the earth, good-will to men,
From heaven’s all gracious King!‘
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled;
And still their heavenly music floats
O‘er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing;
And ever o‘er its Babel sounds
The blesséd angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When, with the ever-circling years,
Comes round the age of gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendours fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

From A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens

Read by Léa Fourure

Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him; Marley’s Ghost!“ and fell again. The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle…

From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll

Read and sung by Vera Yakupova

“Will you walk a little faster?“ said a whiting to a snail.
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!“
But the snail replied “Too far, too far!“ and gave a look askance—
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

“What matters it how far we go?“ his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France—
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?“

From Mr. Splitfoot
by Samantha Hunt

Read by Molly Bronstein

Every record in the collection is old. No one has lived here for a while. No one buys records anymore. Whatever the reason, each album feels like a forgotten archive of the way life once was here on Earth. She chooses the Bee Gees, Spirits Having Flown. She likes the title…

“A Christmas Carol”
by Christina Rossetti

Read by Capucine Blanc

“Please Come Home for Christmas“ (1960)
by Charles Brown

Performed by Frank Robbins (piano) and Sandra Robbins (singing)

Please Come Home for Christmas
Bells will be ringin’ the sad, sad news
Oh, what a Christmas to have the blues
My baby’s gone, I have no friends
To wish me greetings once again

Choirs will be singin’ Silent Night
Christmas carols by candlelight
Please come home for Christmas, please come home for Christmas
If not for Christmas, by New Year’s night

Friends and relations send salutations
Sure as the stars shine above
But this is Christmas, yes, Christmas, my dear
Some time of year to be with the one you love

So won’t you tell me you’ll never more roam?
Christmas and New Year’s will find you home
There’ll be no more sorrow, no grief and pain
And I’ll be happy, happy once again

Ooh, there’ll be no more sorrow, no grief and pain
And I’ll be happy, Christmas once again

“Minstrels“
by William Wordsworth

Sung by Celine Beck

The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened?–—till was paid
Respect to every inmate’s claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And “Merry Christmas“ wished to all.

“L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato“
by George Frideric Händel, sung by the Choir of The King\’s Consort

A contribution from CRC Different Aesthetics A04

L’Allegro (soprano or tenor)
Or let the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the checquer’d shade.

Chorus
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,
Till the livelong daylight fail.
Thus past the day, to bed they creep,
By whisp’ring winds soon lull’d asleep.

Today, on the 16^th December 2024, Claudius Hille and Prof. Dr. Matthew Gardner will be giving a lecture as part of the CRC’s lecture series titled “Musik und Kultur in englischen Badeorten: Bath im 18. Jahrhundert”.

Day and Time: Winter Semester 2024/25, Mondays 6–8pm
Location: Kupferbau, HS 25
Event organiser: Prof. Dr. Jörg Robert

Recording on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nra6TYkDSfo

“Messiah (Christmas Portions)“
by Mark Doty

Read by Eva Marek

A little heat caught

in gleaming rags,

in shrouds of veil,

torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,

two clouds propose a Zion

of their own, blazing

(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close

of a coastal afternoon, December,

while under the steeple

the Choral Society

prepares to perform

Messiah, pouring, in their best

blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.

Not steep, really,

but from here,

the first pew, they‘re a looming

cloudbank of familiar angels:

that neighbor who

fights operatically

with her girlfriend, for one,

and the friendly bearded clerk

from the post office

—tenor trapped

in the body of a baritone? Altos

from the A&P, soprano

from the T-shirt shop:

today they‘re all poise,

costume and purpose

conveying the right note

of distance and formality.

Silence in the hall,

anticipatory, as if we‘re all

about to open a gift we’re not sure

we‘ll like;

how could they

compete with sunset‘s burnished

oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,

when the violins begin.

Who‘d have thought

they‘d be so good? Every valley,

proclaims the solo tenor,

(a sleek blonde

I‘ve seen somewhere before

—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,

and in his handsome mouth the word

is lifted and opened

into more syllables

than we could count, central ah

dilated in a baroque melisma,

liquefied; the pour

of voice seems

to make the unplaned landscape

the text predicts the Lord

will heighten and tame.

This music

demonstrates what it claims:

glory shall be revealed. If art‘s

acceptable evidence,

mustn‘t what lies

behind the world be at least

as beautiful as the human voice?

The tenors lack confidence,

and the soloists,

half of them anyway, don‘t

have the strength to found

the mighty kingdoms

these passages propose

—but the chorus, all together,

equals my burning clouds,

and seems itself to burn,

commingled powers

deeded to a larger, centering claim.

These aren‘t anyone we know;

choiring dissolves

familiarity in an up-

pouring rush which will not

rest, will not, for a moment,

be still.

Aren‘t we enlarged

by the scale of what we‘re able

to desire? Everything,

the choir insists,

might flame;

inside these wrappings

burns another, brighter life,

quickened, now,

by song: hear how

it cascades, in overlapping,

lapidary waves of praise? Still time.

Still time to change.

“On the Thirteenth Day of Christmas My True Love Phoned Me Up“

by Dave Calder

Read by Nora Schalkers

Well, I suppose I should be grateful, you’ve obviously gone
to a lot of trouble and expense – or maybe off your head.
Yes, I did like the birds – the small ones anyway were fun
if rather messy, but now the hens have roosted on my bed
and the rest are nested on the wardrobe. It’s hard to sleep
with all that cooing, let alone the cackling of the geese
whose eggs are everywhere, but mostly in a broken smelly heap
on the sofa. No, why should I mind? I can’t get any peace
anywhere – the lounge is full of drummers thumping tom-toms
and sprawling lords crashed out from manic leaping. The
kitchen is crammed with cows and milkmaids and smells of a million stink-bombs
and enough sour milk to last a year. The pipers? I’d forgotten them –
they were no trouble, I paid them and they went. But I can’t get rid
of these young ladies. They won’t stop dancing or turn the music down
and they’re always in the bathroom, squealing as they skid
across the flooded floor. No, I don’t need a plumber round,
it’s just the swans – where else can they swim? Poor things,
I think they’re going mad, like me. When I went to wash my
hands one ate the soap, another swallowed the gold rings.
And the pear tree died. Too dry. So thanks for nothing, love. Goodbye.

“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas“
by Werner Herzog

Read by Everett Messamore

“Whatever the specifics, existential thirst is the engine that drives the holiday machine“

Werner Herzog\’s original recording, which this entry is a homage to, can be found here.

“The Daft-Days“
by Robert Fergusson

Read by Jonathan Sharp

Now mirk December’s dowie face
Glowrs owr the rigs wi sour grimace,
While, thro’ his minimum of space,
The bleer-ey’d sun,
Wi blinkin light and stealing pace,
His race doth run.

From naked groves nae birdie sings,
To shepherd’s pipe nae hillock rings,
The breeze nae od’rous flavour brings
From Borean cave,
And dwyning nature droops her wings,
Wi visage grave.

Auld Reikie! thou’rt the canty hole,
A bield for many caldrife soul,
Wha snugly at thine ingle loll,
Baith warm and couth,
While round they gar the bicker roll
To weet their mouth.

When merry Yule-day comes, I trou,
You’ll scantlins find a hungry mou;
Sma are our cares, our stamacks fou
O’ gusty gear,
And kickshaws, strangers to our view,
Sin fairn-year.

Then, tho’ at odds wi a’ the warl’,
Amang oursels we’ll never quarrel;
Tho’ Discord gie a canker’d snarl
To spoil our glee,
As lang’s there’s pith into the barrel
We’ll drink and ‘gree.

Fidlers, your pins in temper fix,
And roset weel your fiddle-sticks;
But banish vile Italian tricks
Frae out your quorum,
Not fortes wi pianos mix –
Gie’s Tulloch Gorum.

For nought can cheer the heart sae weel
As can a canty Highland reel;
It even vivifies the heel
To skip and dance:
Lifeless is he wha canna feel
Its influence.

Let mirth abound, let social cheer
Invest the dawning of the year;
Let blithesome innocence appear
To crown our joy;
Nor envy wi sarcastic sneer
Our bliss destroy.

Five Haiku
by Richard Wright

Read by Michael Reid

583

A long winter rain:

A whistling old man whittles

A dream on a stick.

723

In the afterglow

A snow-covered mountain peak

Sings of loneliness.

31

In the falling snow

A laughing boy holds out his palms

Until they are white.

336

Hidden by snowflakes,

A horse neighs excitedly

In a white silence.

681

“Come out of the cold!“

A lighted window beckons

Through falling snow.

“Music on Christmas Morning“
by Anne Brontë

Read by Patricia Klaß

Music I love — but never strain
Could kindle raptures so divine,
So grief assuage, so conquer pain,
And rouse this pensive heart of mine —
As that we hear on Christmas morn,
Upon the wintry breezes borne.

Though Darkness still her empire keep,
And hours must pass, ere morning break;
From troubled dreams, or slumbers deep,
That music kindly bids us wake:
It calls us, with an angels voice,
To wake, and worship, and rejoice;

To greet with joy the glorious morn,
Which angels welcomed long ago,
When our redeeming LORD was born,
To bring the Light of Heaven below;
The Powers of Darkness to dispel,
And rescue Earth from Death and Hell.

While listening to that sacred strain,
My raptured spirit soars on high;
I seem to hear those songs again
Resounding through the open sky,
That kindled such divine delight,
In those who watched their flocks by night.

With them, I celebrate His birth —
Glory to God, in highest Heaven,
Good-will to men, and peace on Earth,
To us a Saviour-King is given;
Our God is come to claim His own,
And Satan\’s power is overthrown!

A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell must renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan’s self must now confess,
That Christ has earned a Right to bless:

Now holy Peace may smile from Heaven,
And heavnly Truth from earth shall spring:
The captives galling bonds are riven,
For our Redeemer is our king;
And He that gave His blood for men
Will lead us home to God again.

Little Drummer Boy
by Katherine K. Davis

Reading & Illustration: Susan Holliday
Pianist: Frank Robbins
Singer: Sandra Robbins

Katherine K. Davis, born 1892 in the US state of Missouri, was a prolific composer, arranger, pianist and music teacher. At the young age of 15, Davis composed her first song Shadow March and continued writing over 600 compositions, many for the choirs at her school. Davis studied at Wellesley College in Boston and the New England Conservatory of Music. She continued at Wellesley teaching music theory and piano. She also studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. During her stay in France, Davis was inspired by the French song Patapan which she translated to “Pa-rum-pum-pum” and it took on a rhythm. In 1941, She wrote The Carol of the Drums, later titled The Little Drummer Boy.