The Great Poets – Lord Byron

Audiobook of the Week One of the great strengths of audiobooks is the offering of poetry read aloud. Naxos’s excellent Great Poets series includes Ronald Pickup reading John Masefield, Robert Glenister reading William Blake, and Michael Sheen reading Coleridge. Latest in an impressive line is Byron, a poet of phenomenal charisma in his heyday. We still quote him unaware. ‘Strange, but true, for truth is… stranger than fiction’, is a line from Don Juan; ‘On with the dance!’ is from Childe Harold. Nowadays few feel inclined to approach such epics, but you will be tempted to do so after listening to this collection of his shorter poems, which Simon Russell Beale reads with wholehearted engagement. Some are fresh, many heartliftingly familiar. There’s the wistful: ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving/ So late into the night,/ Though the heart be still as loving,/ And the moon be still as bright.’ And the searing: ‘In secret we met –/ In silence I grieve,/ That thy heart could forget,/ Thy spirit deceive./ If I should meet thee/ After long years,/ How should I greet thee?–/ With silence and tears.’ And the romping rhythms of The Destruction of Sennacherib: ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…’

Christina Hardyment, The Times