Sealed A Personal Choice by online Alec Guinness Vinyl Record Album LP readings from Shakespeare, Cummings, Sitwell, Auden, Nash, Browning
A Personal Choice by Alec Guinness finds this excellent orator and actor reading some of his favorite poems and lines from famous plays. From the back cover: There may be rhyme in this choice of poems but there is very little reason. The selection is purely eclectic. I have started the record with four short poems by the late E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), as Cummings is my most recent enthusiasm, and the things he writes about with such delicacy and precision and wit—spring, birds, moonlight—are the very stuff of poetry, to my mind. Although Dame Edith Sitwell's Façade poems have been done often I couldn't resist including I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside and Polka for the sheer pleasure of trying to get my tongue around them at speed. Hilaire Belloc's (1870-1953) Tarantella seemed a sonorous way of closing the first mood of these poems.
From Belloc I have moved straight and self-indulgently into the imaginative romanticism of W. J. Turner (1889-1946) and Robert Graves' tender advice on the stuff of dreams. Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is also a dream poem of the sadness and foolishness of war. It would seem he had a premonition of death in war, as he was killed in action November 4, 1918.
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A Personal Choice by Alec Guinness
Vinyl: Factory Sealed
Cover: Factory Sealed, light edge wear.
Album Tracks:
Sweet Spring Is You by E. E. Cummings
When Faces Called Flowers Float Out The Ground by E. E. Cummings
O The Sun Comes by E. E. Cummings
The Moon Looked Into My Window by E. E. Cummings
"Facade": I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside; Polka by Edith Sitwell
Tarantella by Hilaire Belloc
Romance by Walter James Turner
Through Nightmare by Robert Graves
Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen
Hearing Of Harvest, Rotting In The Valley by W. H. Auden
Clerk Saunders by Anonymous
King John And The Abbot Of Canterbury by Anonymous
Henry VI, Part 3 - Act II, Scene 5: Soliloquy by Shakespeare
A Toccata Of Galuppi's by Robert Browning
Serviette In A Lovely Home by Ogden Nash
Spectator Ab Extra by Arthur Hugh Clough
Night by William Blake
The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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If time and space had allowed I would have liked to place alongside W. H. Auden's Hearing of Harvest, Rotting in the Valley Sir Philip Sidney's Strephon and Klaius, for both poets have used the same device of line endings continually repeated and played with, but Mr. Auden's is the greater poem in any case, and I for one always dream of islands. The two anonymous ballads, very different in content, which I have chosen are two of my favorites, one amusing and the other online pitiful.
Shakespeare's Henry VI is but seldom performed, which is not surprising, but the King's contemplative soliloquy can stand up to the very best, and it contains, besides, the wonderful “His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle." Shakespeare's kings, when put in a tight corner, usually come up with something simple and splendid.
There is a tinkling sharpness of the clavichord, written in words instead of musical notes, in A Toccata of Galuppi's by Robert Browning (1812-1889), and a pleasing, dry cynicism, though I suppose as a poem it cannot be classed as "great”; but then I haven't necessarily chosen, in all cases, what I would consider “great” poems -you can't live day in and out on a mountaintop; you need to browse in the valleys.
Some months ago Mr. Ogden Nash gave me permission to read Serviette in a Lovely Home at the Poetry Center of the YMHA in New York and, now, has allowed me to record it. I have added Arthur Hugh Clough's (1819-1861) gay tribute to money as a footnote to Mr. Nash's brilliant indignation with Miss Nancy Mitford.
Blake's (1757-1827) Night, generous, limpid and angelic, I've included to satisfy my nostalgia for childhood's dreams, though I must confess that, in these later years, the image of a lion nibbling grass alongside sheep seems somewhat improbable.
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is an old favorite of mine, using what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm,” which I have never understood, but written with a wild enthusiasm which I find infectious. - Alec Guinness
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