A reading from
The Sacrament of Easter by Roger Greenacre
Reader, NORMAN MITCHELL
and Programme News
Sacred songs and old favourites from the hy,mn book
Introduced by SANDY MACPHERSON
A Sunday supplement to Woman's Hour
Introduced by MARJORIE ANDERSON
Read the Small Print: MARGARET POWELL 'S account of her lirst trip abroad
Down with Ugliness: say the members of Doncaster's Junior Civic Trust: a report by DAVID QUARMBY
Ages and Attitudes: a psychiatrist looks at ' the middle-aged crisis '
Little Sparrow: a portrait of the French singer EDITH Pur , presented by PETER TREWARTHA
Chairman, PHILIP HOPE-WALLACE
Theatre: HAROLD HOBSON
Broadcasting: IAIN HAMILTON
Book: CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE
Art: GEORGE MELLY
Film: DEREK PROUSE
Producer, Carl Wildman
and Programme News
A spontaneous discussion by THE RT. HON.
ANTHONY WEDGWOOD BENN
THE RT. HON. QUINTIN HOGG
MANUELA SYKES
Travelling Question-Master, FREDDY GRISEWOOD
Produced by Michael Bowen from Cullompton, Devon
Last Friday's broadcast (Light)
FRANKLIN ENGELMANN recently visited
Beeston and Stapleford, Notts
Produced by Richard Burwood
and Programme News
REGINALD LEOPOLD AND THE PALM COURT ORCHESTRA
Visiting artist,
ELIZABETH FRETWELL
Elizabeth Fretwell broadcasts by permission of Sadler's Wells Opera Company
by ALISTAIR COOKE
Introduced by ALAN KEITH with gramophone records of the most popular pieces of music chosen by listeners
Three programmes based on incidents in the lives of the poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Written and adapted from contemporary sources by DEREK PARKER
The romance between Lord Byron Lamb and Lady Caroline Lamb
with and
Produced by JOHN POWELL
The Passionate Years
T. S. ELIOT once pointed out. with perfect truth, that it is almost impossible to read the poetry of Byron, Shelley, or Keats without remembering the men themselves, with all their failings. 'I feel a thousand mortal things about me. But nothing god-like,' wrote Byron; and it may be that their own words reveal the characters of the three poets rather more clearly than they would have wished, in the three programmes to be broadcast under he general title The Passionate Years.
The incidents with which the programmes deal are amusing, but also tragic: Byron's affair with Lady Caroline Lamb is often like a French farce - yet it fatally injured her mind, and threw him on rebound into his disastrous marriage. Shelley and Byron, boating on Lake Leman, were immediately friends; but Shelley was shattered at the news of Byron's liaison with Claire Claremont, and the holiday ended abruptly and painfully. Though Keats's letters are full of fun, Coleridge, meeting him, said: 'When I shook him by the hand, there was death.'
The Romantic poets loved and lived life with passionate intensity: it was the consciousness of their own, and each other's imperfections which in different ways wrecked the lives of Byron and Shelley; Keats, potentially almost angelic, was mangled by the inexorable progress of disease, his own nature warped and ruined. If Byron, Shelley, and even Keats, seem at times to be cruel or vulgar or silly, one had best remember one's own frailties, and with Byron hope to attain... a disposition
To love and to be merciful, to pardon The folly of my species, and (that's human) To be indulgent to my own.
DEREK PARKER
Thy will be done
Hebrews 10, v. 7
Psalm 40 (Broadcast psalter)
St. Matthew 26, vv. 36-46
Isaiah 53, vv. 1-6
Ah. holy Jesus (BBC H.B. 500)
Job 13, vv. 14, 15a, 16a, 18
Haydn and Mozart
Last ef a weekly series
