Audiobook · read by volunteers
Phantom-Wooer
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)
Read by Claire Goget, Cori Samuel, David Grimes, Danielle Buttrey, Beth Peat, Ezwa, Justin Brett, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Merryb, Mark F. Smith · 13 chapters · 17 min
About the book
The Phantom-Wooer is a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a writer of strange and haunting imagination. Its speaker is a ghostly lover, a dead man who returns to a living woman and woos her from beyond the grave, in verse that is tender, eerie and strangely musical. This recording gathers thirteen different readings of the poem by LibriVox volunteers. Hearing it so many times, in different voices, brings out the shifting mood of the lines: sometimes soft and wistful, sometimes uncanny, sometimes almost playful. At around twenty minutes in total, it is a brief but memorable listen, and a good way to discover a poet whose work deserves to be better known. Poetry lovers who enjoy a ghost story told in rhythm and rhyme will find it especially rewarding.
Introduction
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was an English poet and dramatist who also trained in medicine and spent much of his adult life on the Continent. His work is full of death, ghosts and the grotesque, handled with a dark wit and a lyrical gift that earned him the admiration of later poets, although he was little read in his own day. He is perhaps best known for his long dramatic work Death's Jest-Book.
The Phantom-Wooer is a shorter piece, a song in which a dead lover addresses the woman he left behind. It belongs to the tradition of the Gothic and Romantic ballad, but its tone is distinctive: caressing, mournful and slightly mocking at once. The poem was published after Beddoes's death, in 1851.
This is a multi-version recording, a format that LibriVox uses for short poems. Thirteen volunteers each recorded the poem, and the results are collected here one after another. It was the weekly poetry project for the week of the twenty-eighth of January, 2007. As with all such collections, the pleasure lies in comparison. The same words are delivered quietly, dramatically, tenderly or with a shiver, and each reading reveals a different side of the poem. It is a short listen, and one that is easy to repeat. Lovers of Gothic verse and admirers of the macabre will find it rewarding, and it is short enough to be heard several times in a row, comparing one voice with the next.
Public domain
Thomas Lovell Beddoes died in 1849: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text