Reading of Life, with Other Poems
Reading of Life, with Other Poems
George Meredith's 1907 collection unfolds as a sustained meditation on the passage of existence. The opening sequence, A Circle of Life, traces the arc from birth through death with a philosopher's precision and a poet's feeling for the moment's weight. These four poems move with the inevitability of seasons, each stanza a small death and small renewal. The miscellaneous poems that follow pursue similar preoccupations: the natural world's indifferent beauty, the tension between human longing and cosmic order, the strange dignity of mortality. Meredith writes with Victorian confidence but modern unease, his lines dense with observation and thought. This is not comfortable reading but it is necessary reading for anyone who has ever stood at the edge of a meadow at dusk and felt time moving through them. The poetry asks what it means to be conscious creatures in a universe that does not explain itself.
X-Ray
Read by
Group Narration
5 readers
Michael L, Jim Locke, Larry Wilson, Nemo +1 more
![Birds and Nature, Vol. 12 No. 1 [June 1902]illustrated by Color Photography](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-47881.png&w=3840&q=75)
