Tag: poetry

Kubla Khan or a Vision of Dream by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (read by Wayne June)

SFFaudio Online Audio

Kubla Khan is a wondrous dream inspired poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written in 1797, but published in 1816, it is said to have been composed one night after Coleridge had been taking opium and reading a work describing Xanadu (the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China, Kublai Khan).

The way the great narrator Wayne June reads it you can almost feel the narcotic vapours enveloping you in their ethereal somnifacience.

After you’ve astral projected into the audio, feel free to grab hold of this ever so slighty more tangible |PDF|.

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘t would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Kubla Khan illustrated by Dugald Walker

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Canal by H.P. Lovecraft

SFFaudio News

The Canal by H.P. Lovecraft is a short 1932 poem usually published as a part of the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence. Some printings mistakenly change the last word from “clay” to “day.”

The Canal by H.P. Lovecraft

Somewhere in dream there is an evil place
Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along
A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong
Of frightful things whence oily currents race.
Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead
Wind off to streets one may or may not know,
And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow
Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.

There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound
Is of the oily water as it glides
Under stone bridges, and along the sides
Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.
None lives to tell when that stream washed away
Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.

The Canal by H.P. Lovecraft

There was a very very loose comics adaptation of The Canal found in Richard Corben’s Marvel Max series H.P. Lovecraft’s Haunt of Horror (issue 2):

The Canal adapted from the poem by H.P. Lovecraft - for Marvel Max series H.P. Lovecraft's Haunt of Horror, #2

Posted by Jesse Willis

The House by H.P. Lovecraft

SFFaudio News

The House, by H.P. Lovecraft, is a short poem first published in The Philosopher 1, No. 1, December 1920. The illustrated version, below, came from Weird Tales, March 1948. The artist was Boris Dolgov. Based on the at you’d think it was a Halloween poem. But the poem is explicitly set in June.

The House by H.P. Lovecraft

The House by H. P. Lovecraft

’Tis a grove-circled dwelling
Set close to a hill,
Where the branches are telling
Strange legends of ill;
Over timbers so old
That they breathe of the dead,
Crawl the vines, green and cold,
By strange nourishment fed;
And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.

In the gardens are growing
Tall blossoms and fair,
Each pallid bloom throwing
Perfume on the air;
But the afternoon sun
With its shining red rays
Makes the picture loom dun
On the curious gaze,
And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.

The rank grasses are waving
On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
When the red sun has set,
And the soul of the watcher is fill’d with faint pictures he fain would forget.

It was in the hot Junetime
I stood by that scene,
When the gold rays of noontime
Beat bright on the green.
But I shiver’d with cold,
Groping feebly for light,
As a picture unroll’d—
And my age-spanning sight
Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Bryan Cranston)

SFFaudio News

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Bryan Cranston – an ad for Breaking Bad)

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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[via Cynical-C]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Pursuit by H.P. Lovecraft

SFFaudio Online Audio

Today, when I read Eric S. Rabkin H.P. Lovecraft’s Alethia Phrikodes we both agreed it was great and full of Edgar Allan Poe. Then, I mentioned that one of the differences between Poe and Lovecraft’s poetry was the love a woman (Anabelle Lee and The Raven for example). Lovecraft’s poems, I said, unlike most of Poe’s most famous poems, significantly lack women. But Eric pointed out that the loved one is in Lovecraft, but it isn’t a woman – it is the book. And to make his point he read me this sonnet, from the Fungi From Yuggoth sequence:

Pursuit by H.P. Lovecraft

I held the book beneath my coat, at pains
To hide the thing from sight in such a place;
Hurrying through the ancient harbour lanes
With often-turning head and nervous pace.
Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick
Peered at me oddly as I hastened by,
And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick
For a redeeming glimpse of clear blue sky.

No one had seen me take the thing-but still
A blank laugh echoes in my whirling head,
And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill
Lurked in that volume I had coveted.
The way grew strange – the walls alike and madding –
And far behind me, unseen feet were padding.

Posted by Jesse Willis