Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I want to talk about Alfred

Lord Tennyson, the Victorian poet and I would say without doubt one of my favourite poets

of all time and one of the first poets that really fired my belief that poetry can raise

you up and be beautiful and earth shattering. I discovered Tennyson initially in my Birmingham

Polytechnic days but I did a 6,000 word essay on Tennyson at Warwick University back in the

80s and things were different. Then I was a younger man with stranger ideas in some ways and

I remember I had to see my tutor and explain what the essay would be about and I said I

want it to be Tennyson's Mord, which is the name of a poem, Tennyson's Mord, a Freudian analysis

and he said oh god is it going to be all about holes and things and it was, I've just sort of

discovered Freud and psychoanalysis and all that. I have sort of since on discovery but at the

time I was very impressed. Tennyson's Mord begins, I hate the dreadful hollow behind the

little wood. It slips in the field above a dabbled with blood red heath. The red ribbed

leg is drip with a silent horror of blood and I thought that had a lot to do with the speakers

attitude to women and these mother and birth slash death. As your Brenner said in the

King and I, accept a ra, accept a ra, accept a ra. Anyway that was then and this is now I still love

Tennyson. I don't really love Freud. That was a brief flirtation whereas Tennyson has been one of

those long relationships where you sit at night by the fireside holding hands. Tennyson died in

1892 but there is an existing recording of Tennyson. Incredibly reading one of his most famous poems,

The Charge of the Light Brigade, you must have heard the charge. I'll give you a bit. I'm not,

that's not one of the poems I'm talking about but I'm going to chuck it at just a couple of

sections and it's just, this is Tennyson for me. The rhythm, everything is there and it's about

in case you don't know. The Charge of the Light Brigade was an incident at the Battle of Balaclava

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