Readings from the Pavilion End

S5 Ep 4: Night Mail by W. H. Auden

Today's poem was part of a 1936 British documentary, produced by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit to demonstrate the postal system's modernity, and to boost morale of postal workers following the Great Depression. The film, which you can find online, documents the nightly steam train that travels from London to Scotland. The so-called Postal Service train is dedicated to carrying only post, and moves from Euston station in London, to Glasgow, then to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The film ends with this poem, which vividly captures the quiet drama of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway's Scots Guardsman, touching the lives of so many. 
Find out more about the poem's interesting history here. 
Now off to write a letter to someone special!

S5 Ep 3: Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf by Roald Dahl

A little bedtime story for small and big kids, enjoy!

S5 Ep 2: Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes by William Shakespeare

Today we have Sonnet 29, one of the most beloved love sonnets of all time. You might be surprised that this forms part of the 'Fair Youth' series of 126 sonnets that scholars speculate were addressed not to Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, but to a young man. This compact sonnet consists of a single sentence and its meaning is direct, clear.. the speaker, in love and loved, would not trade his disgrace position with the state of kings. It's a little late for Valentines, but here's a belated greeting. 
Find the sonnet here. 

S5 Ep 1: The Power of Taste by Zbigniew Herbert

Today's poem is a translation of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's The Power of Taste. Herbert, who lived through both Nazi occupation and communist rule, understood how far-reaching and oppressive authoritarian regimes were. This poem offers a sharp critique of the vulgarity of totalitarianism, suggesting that an aesthetic sensibility, the pursuit of beauty and dignity, can be an effective form of defiance. 
Find the poem here. 

Galle Test Cricket 2025 - Day 4 (Final Day)

Bill's comments on the fourth and final day of the Galle test in Sri Lanka. Tell us what you think of the series, and find more cricket related writings on the blog. 

Galle Test Cricket 2025 - Day 3 (Moving Day?)

Bill reports live from Day 3 in Galle, Sri Lanka, an intriguing day.

Galle Test Cricket 2025 - Day 2 (all rather inevitable)

Bill reports live from Day 2 in Galle, with Australia finishing in 'complete command' - Australia 330-3. A splendid partnership between Smith and Carey. 
 

Galle Test Cricket 2025 - Day 1 (An old-fashioned day)

Bill reports live from the Galle Test in Sri Lanka.

S4 Ep 7: Byzantium by W.B. Yeats

We complete the final half of the Byzantium poems which was published a few years after Sailing to Byzantium (which can be found in Season 4 Episode 6). If in Sailing, Yeats aspires to become immortalised into a golden bird, a work of art, the spell seems to break in Byzantium as night falls agonisingly. The speaker is surrounded by eerie, nightmarish images of death-in-life and life-in-death. It is a dense and complex poem, somewhat puzzling poem that reflects Yeats' position as a romantic-modernist poet. 
Today's episode also features a preview of an upcoming cricket series where Bill reports on the 2025 test matches in Galle, Sri Lanka. 

S4 Ep 6: Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats

Today we have the first of two canonical poems by W.B. Yeats that form the 'Byzantium poems'. Sailing to Byzantium, dated 1927, was written in the later years of his life and crystallises the poet's 'persistent longing for spiritual redemption through the timelessness of art' (David A. Ross, Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work). 
The poem is sensuous, describing the natural world in its fullness that quickly descends also into decay. It recalls Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', but where Keats' nightingale pulls the young man towards an afterlife (Away! away! for I will fly to thee), Yeats' golden bird (Of hammered gold and gold enamelling) is set on a bough to sing 'Of what is past, or passing, or to come'.
Byzantium, an Ancient Greek city, later Constantinople and known today as Istanbul, holds an idealised place in Yeats' imagination. In a radio talk in 1921, Yeats described trying to "write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul" his subject.
Listeners may also find this quote interesting: 
“I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St Sophia [ad 537] and closed the Academy of Plato [ad 529]. I think I could find in some little wine shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to Princes and Clerics and a murderous madness in the mob, show us a lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body. I think that in early Byzantium, and maybe never before or since in recorded his tory, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, and that architect and artificers - though not, it may be, poets, for language had been the instrument of contro versy and must have grown abstract - spoke to the multitude and the few alike.”
(Source: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/notes-on-sailing-to-byzantium/)