Four Hymns: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Four Hymns, credited to Edmund Spenser, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Four Hymns by Edmund Spenser. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland Spenser explains in the dedication of this volume that the hymns to love and to beauty were written early in his career and their "heavenly" counterparts much later, in response to the dissatisfaction that one of the author's patrons expressed toward the earlier poems, although to a modern sensibility those are in no way offensive except perhaps in focusing upon the sublunary world. However that may be, all four poems are idealistic, expressing the neo-Platonic philosophy that was growing in popularity in Elizabethan England. According to this doctrine, the soul is primary and shapes the body that clothes it. The material world is only a pale reflection of the ideal world, and mortals gradually, through growth from infancy to old age, unfold, or "dilate," the many-dimensioned wholeness of their being as it exists in eternity. Life on earth, a journey to heaven, is conceived of as the pursuit of beauty, the proper object of earthly love, and the quest of love leads the soul back to the source of love and beauty, God. The structure of The Faerie Queene rests upon this concept. - Summary by T. A. Copeland

Recording facts

• Recording title: Four Hymns
• Author credits: Edmund Spenser
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 4
• Listed recording duration: 1:11:35

Catalogue topics

• philosophy
• love
• neoplatonism

Track guide

1. 01 - Part 1 — 19:26
2. 02 - Part 2 — 16:23
3. 03 - Part 3 — 17:54
4. 04 - Part 4 — 17:52

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.