Ghosts' Moonshine

Thomas Lovell Beddoes lived from 1803 to 1849 and is remembered as an English poet and dramatist with a taste for the macabre. The son of a physician, he studied medicine in Germany and spent much of his adult life in Germany and Switzerland, where he died in 1849. His best-known work is the verse drama Death’s Jest-Book, which he reworked for years and which was published only in 1850, the year after his death, and he wrote with a mixture of Gothic imagination, dark humour and a sustained interest in death and the afterlife. His poems circulated slowly during his lifetime and found wider readers only later, after his death.

The Ghosts’ Moonshine belongs among his shorter poems. It is a compact piece whose title promises ghosts and moonlight, in keeping with the taste for the supernatural that runs through his work.

This recording is part of the weekly poetry project that LibriVox volunteers run. Each week a short poem is chosen, and many readers record it independently, so the result is a set of versions rather than a single performance. Here there are fourteen, each labelled with the reader’s initials, and the collection lasts around twenty-five minutes in all.

That structure is the chief pleasure of the recording. Hearing the same lines read again and again lets you notice small differences in rhythm and mood, and see how much a reader’s choices shape a poem. Because the poem is so short, you can compare all fourteen versions in a single sitting. It is well worth hearing for lovers of Gothic verse and of poetry read aloud.