Epithalamion: An Unusual Invocation

In today’s episode of The Poetry Fix, we encounter another one of La Fontaine’s fables which describes the misadventures of a naive young animal who fails to realize danger when he is faced with it. This tale, however, sees our hero to safety. Join Erika Kyba for a reading and analysis of the poet’s conclusion versus the translator’s interpretive choice.

“The right of the strongest is always the greatest,” La Fontaine writes in “The Wolf and the Lamb,” a disturbing fable about the overthrow of justice by a powerful and malicious entity. Is this really all Fontaine wants to tell us, though? Join Erika Kyba to investigate the subtler insights which our poet leaves us with.

Do you seek out change, or view it as a destructive force? Edmund Spencer, in “Mutabilitie,” imagines change as tyrannizing over the lives of men to gain glory for herself. Join Erika Kyba to learn why Spencer takes this angle.

Is it dangerous to cling to the departed, when it is time for them to pass into the afterlife? The folk poet of “The Wife of Usher’s Well” seems to think so. Join Erika Kyba for the full episode and analysis.

If you've completed high school English, it's likely you've heard of the standard "invocation of the muse" invoked by epic poets such as Homer and Virgil. What would happen if a poet used this invocation to frame a poem about a wedding, rather than adventure and war? Spencer's "Epithalamion" accomplishes just that; join Erika Kyba to encounter this love ballad.

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? John Donne, our poet who believes so strongly in the united souls of lovers, asks himself what happens to this harmony when the lovers are separated. Join Erika Kyba for a reading and analysis of this epic love poem.

When you love someone, do you love them with your soul, mind, or body? Is love by one of the faculties superior to that of the others? John Donne meditates on this theme in "The Ecstasy." Join Erika Kyba for a reading and analysis of this poem.

Is it possible to have enough love to be content? Can a Christian be content with God's love, being that God is infinite, or will he always crave more of God? And what relationship does God's love for us have with our love for others? John Donne wrestles with all these questions and more in "Since She Whom I Lov'd Hath Paid Her Last Debt." Tune in for Erika Kyba's reading of this complex poem.

Can you know others without knowing yourself? This is the question which David Whyte interrogates in "Start Close In," as he examines what it means to cross over into the unknown territory of The Other. Join Erika Kyba to delve into sound advice...with a poetic twist. 

We tend to think of beauty in terms of purity and proportion, but Hopkins upends those conventional ideas in "Pied Beauty." Instead, he proposes that God "fathers-forth" his beauty in the irregular and variable. Join Erika Kyba for her reading of why Hopkins celebrates sublimity in the strange.