Sonnets and Songs: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Sonnets and Songs, credited to Arthur Upson, 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 Sonnets and Songs by Arthur Upson. Read in English by Bruce Kachuk Arthur Upson's insightful and sensitive poetic art is grandly displayed in this selection of some of his best work. As a tribute to Upson, Ruth Shepard Phelps proclaims in the introductory poem of this volume, "And all the rare and lovely things that are / Bloom newly now to celebrate thy name." Indeed "rare and lovely" are apt concepts to describe the nature of Upson's work, his poems being conceived by a man with a quest, with a passion for meaning, a man "fain to know / What are humanity and human fate". Upson is a grand poet, an "explorer of a star / Where all is strange", and although his poet's determination is mired in "phantom days, each one / The shadow of a hope", he is determined to continue his fervent search for meaning, despite realizing that, "Slow-tongued Experience teaches me to bear / On lips more patient Love's impatient prayer." Just as Upson's talent faces no diminishment by the "phantom days" that surround him, neither is his poetic skill encumbered by its mandatory human incarnation - an incarnation of which the poet is intensely aware, intensely affected by, and which compels him to produce works of insight and earthly resonance to transform his quest for a search for meaning, for truth, and for a comprehension and enactment of the power of love. This is the essence of the current that runs through this collection and is manifested in each of these magnificent poems, resulting in an uplifting volume of inspiring readability and rousing introspective depth. - Summary by Bruce Kachuk

Recording facts

• Recording title: Sonnets and Songs
• Author credits: Arthur Upson
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 37
• Listed recording duration: 55:05

Catalogue topics

• nature
• death
• love
• loss
• fate
• classic poetry
• yearning

Opening tracks: first 24 of 37

1. 00 - Dedication by Arthur Upson; Introductory Poem and Note by Ruth Shepard Phelps — 2:13
2. 01 - After a Dolmetsch Concert — 0:58
3. 02 - The Earth-Errand — 1:25
4. 03 - "Vers La Vie" — 1:14
5. 04 - Phantom Life — 0:38
6. 05 - "At The Hill's Top Bides Love" — 1:07
7. 06 - Love's Patience — 1:20
8. 07 - A Motive out of Lohengrin — 1:19
9. 08 - My Song Must Not Forsake Me — 1:15
10. 09 - The Lake — 1:01
11. 10 - Absence and Presence — 0:51
12. 11 - A Song of Love and Your Dreams — 0:50
13. 12 - The Mystery of Beauty — 2:08
14. 13 - The Tragic Winds — 1:34
15. 14 - To a Picture of My Mother as a Girl — 0:42
16. 15 - Song of Agamede (From "The City") — 0:59
17. 16 - The Sobbing Woman — 1:18
18. 17 - The Incurables — 1:19
19. 18 - Chorus (From "The City ") — 2:27
20. 19 - Arlington — 1:15
21. 20 - Between Hingham and Braintree — 1:46
22. 21 - Wheat Elevators — 1:16
23. 22 - From "Octaves in an Oxford Garden" — 7:11
24. 23 - Minstrels in Bloomsbury — 1:09

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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.