Each week Dr. J shares a poem from one of the nineteenth-century American Fireside Poets, reading it aloud and commenting on it to enhance the listener’s enjoyment of the poem.
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Priscilla Mullins and John Alden wed, symbolizing the continuity of life in a true pastoral image.Fireside Poems
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The young Endymion sleeps Endymion’s sleep . . .Fireside Poems
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The essence of each poet: Chaucer and ShakespearreFireside Poems
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A young man learns of the death of his beloved when he comes upon a strange ceremony.Fireside Poems
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The poet recounts an apocryphal story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and then asks "whose was theright and the wrong?"Fireside Poems
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The poet asks our sympathy for a woman the world considers unworthy of sympathy.Fireside Poems
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The poet fancies himself related to a willow tree and laments the negative influence of Puritanism on New England and American cultureFireside Poems
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A writer finishing a book ike a family going to bed.Fireside Poems
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A "beatiful youth" is killled by a sharpshooter's bullet in the Civil War. The bullet continues on to his hometown, where it takes another life.Fireside Poems
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Longfellow remembers the burial of his friend Nathaniel HawthorneFireside Poems
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What should we cheer?Fireside Poems
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We shouldn't forget the modest flowers of April when the showier flowers of May come into bloom.Fireside Poems
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The poet meditates in the darkness upon time and eternity.Fireside Poems
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On the 19th of April, 1775, Pau Revere rides to alert his countrymen that British troops are moving from Boston to seize Patriot munitions at Concord, Massachussetts.Fireside Poems
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The poet is grateful that he s able to dwell in modes of being other than his own.Fireside Poems
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A poet contemplates the gulf between medieval Christianity and the modern world.Fireside Poems
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An old buccaneer dreams of going to sea again.Fireside Poems
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the poet anticipaes atime of world peace.Fireside Poems
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To have any hope of happiness with a man, a woman from when she is a child must develop both a strong sense of self-confidence and a strong sense of self-worth.Fireside Poems
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A faather is late coming home . . .Fireside Poems
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A medieval minnesinger provdes for the care of the birds who taught himFireside Poems
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The importance and need of community seen in a snow-bound farm.Fireside Poems
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Two portraits: one of the poet's learning disabled uncle and one of a young schoolteacher such as would go to the South after the Civil War to teach the sons and the daughters of the Freedmen.Fireside Poems
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An early 19th-century New England family passes a snowbound evening telling stories.Fireside Poems
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A memory of a snowstorm in rural Massachussetts.Fireside Poems
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The artist Michael Angelo reflects on the demands and importance of art.Fireside Poems
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A schooner sinks in a storm with the daughter of its captain tied to the mast for her safety.Fireside Poems
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A poem challenges us to think both about poetry and about nature: is nature simpy a material fact that can be understood through scentific materialism, or are their apects of nature that are unknowable trhough the scientific world view?Fireside Poems
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The first winter snowfall brings both sadness and peace to a faher grieving the death of an infant daughter.Fireside Poems
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The trials and tribulations of a child on Christmas morning.Fireside Poems
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A mother and daughter build a gingerbread house as Christmas approaches.Fireside Poems
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December represented in all its facets: natural, pagan, and Christian. Syncretism as a characteristic of Christianity.Fireside Poems
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The Norse god Balder, considered as a transition figure from Norse paganism to Christianity.Fireside Poems
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Can sweetness transform bitterness?Fireside Poems
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Our most familiar Thanksgiving Day poemFireside Poems
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A healing ceremony of the Ojibwa nation, shown to be effective in the treatment of grief.Fireside Poems
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For Veteran's Day, the Band of Brother's speech from Henry V by William Shakespeare.Fireside Poems
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Aremembrnce of thoughts of despair and suicide by on of America's best-loved poets.Fireside Poems
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A slaughtered pig comes back from the dead to avenge himself on the butcher who slaughterered him. A scary poem for Halloween.Fireside Poems
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A poem in Hoosier dialect celebrating autumn in the rural MidwestFireside Poems
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The first fatal encounter between the Massachusetts Pilgrims and the native Massachusetts people, a counterweight to the story of the first ThanksgivingFireside Poems
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The beauty of red maples in autumn is used by the poet to convey the beauty--and loss--of his beloved.Fireside Poems
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Longfellow invents a legend of a Viking/Norse visit to North America before Coumbus.Fireside Poems
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Poetry as an alternative to Monday Night Football and he general hurly-burly of the world, with a shout-out to The Last Duel.Fireside Poems
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Wordsworth, Longfellow, and our modern estrangement from nature. The World Is Too Much With UsFireside Poems
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A classic moment from American literature, when the Puritan maiden Priscilla says to John Alden "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" and thus seals forever America as a place of freedom for women, men, and love.Fireside Poems
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Still let it ever be thy pride/To linger by the laborer’s sideFireside Poems
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A mid-day reverie of all the human activities done with ropes, both happy and sad, good and bad.Fireside Poems
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A woman on here bridal night raises her hand to stab her sleeping husband.Fireside Poems
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The poet finds strength gazing on the planet Mars in the night sky.Fireside Poems
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