weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
The Weekend Listener is an eclectic weekly list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. Posts in this series are published on Fridays – please search the website for the previous instalments. LANGUAGE Lexicon Valley: Why Do Languages Have Gender Photo by Tim Mossholder on Pexels.com In my …
In many countries around the world, 2nd November is marked as the Day of the Dead. It is a day on which people remember their loved ones who have passed away; they might visit their graves or attend special religious services. On that theme, for this week’s poetry post I have chosen a poem by …
Continue reading "“Haunted Houses” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow"
The Weekend Listener is an eclectic weekly list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. Posts in this series are published on Fridays – please search the website for the previous instalments. LANGUAGE Word of Mouth: A Murmuration of Starlings Photo by Somya Dinkar on Pexels.com I've recently …
This week’s poetry post continues our seasonal journey through autumn-themed poems. If you’re an English language learner, don’t miss the vocabulary exercise found at the bottom of the post, along with the links to some additional tools that will help you with this poem. “To Autumn” was written by John Keats, one the most important …
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the most important poets of the 18th and the early 19th century. He was a close friend of another very influential English poet, William Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy - so close that he chose to move to the Lake District to live near them. The two Lake Poets …
The Weekend Listener is an eclectic weekly list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. Posts in this series are published on Fridays – please search the website for the previous instalments. LANGUAGE The World in Words: How the Basque language has survived The Basque Land, Library of …
Alfred Tennyson was a celebrated 19th century English poet whose life and work largely coincided with the reign of Queen Victoria. He was in many ways the embodiment of the Victorian literary tastes and widely recognised as Britain’s leading poet of the time, not the least through being honoured with the title of the Poet …
In this post I would like to invite you to read and ponder on a poem by one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Robert Frost. It is titled “October”, first published in England in 1913, in a largely autobiographical collection of poems called A Boy’s Will. O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves …
In an earlier post about interpreting poetry, I tried to convince my readers of the merits of reading poems and enjoying them as a form of art. There I also presented a six-step approach to interpreting poems that I will be referring to throughout this article, so you might want to have a look at …
Continue reading "Discussing Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Tables Turned’"
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B2 and above.] Let’s be honest, reading poetry doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Same as with visual arts or classical music, sometimes it's difficult to understand complex symbolism or to follow a poet’s train of thought. And what to do with …
Continue reading "How to interpret a poem (with a little help from Walt Whitman)"
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