Programming note: Steyn's Song of the Week can now be heard weekly on Serenade Radio, every Sunday at 5.30pm British Summer Time. If you missed today's show, you can hear the repeat at 5.30am Monday UK time - that's 9.30pm Pacific Sunday evening on the West Coast of North America, or Monday lunchtime in Australia.
As the summer gets into gear into the Northern Hemisphere, welcome to the first of our poetry anthologies for this year. Mark's put together a quartet of favorite poems, and matched them to some appropriate musical interludes. The poets are variously English, American and Indian and stretch back almost half-a-millennium to the very first poetry collection ever published in England. The composers include Delius, Rimsky Korsakov, Bizet and a great favorite with Tales for Our Time listeners, Albert Ketèlbey. From the Wall Street Crash to dancing eunuchs, life's rich variety is all here.
We hope this three-quarters of an hour of words and music are a pleasant break from the civilizational assault all around this Sunday. To listen, simply click above.
If you'd like to catch up with earlier poems in the series, you can find them on our Sunday Poems home page. As with Tales for Our Time and our music specials and The Mark Steyn Show, we've archived Mark's poetry picks in an easy-to-access Netflix-style tile format that we hope makes it the work of moments to prowl around and alight on something that piques your interest of a weekend, whether Kipling or Keats.
Steyn's Sunday Poems is a presentation of The Mark Steyn Club. Mark launched the Steyn Club over four years ago, and we're immensely heartened by all the longtime SteynOnline regulars - from Fargo to Fiji, Madrid to Malaysia, West Virginia to Witless Bay - who've signed up to be a part of it. Membership in The Mark Steyn Club also comes with non-poetic benefits, including:
~Our latest audio adventure in Tales for Our Time, and its four dozen thrilling predecessors;
~Other audio series on pertinent topics, such as last year's nightly installments of Climate Change: The Facts, and this year's weekly serialization of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade;
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with Mark, such as last Thursday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of Mark's Mailbox, The Mark Steyn Show, and other video content;
~Advance booking for Mark's live appearances around the world, assuming such things are ever again permitted;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the chance to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here. And for our special Gift Membership see here. Oh, and by the way, Mark's live appearances often include a live performance of a Sunday Poem.
One other benefit to Club Membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like this feature or consider Mark's poem readings a bust, then feel free to comment away below. Please do stay on topic on all our comment threads, because that's the way to keep them focused and readable. With that caution, have at it (in verse, if you wish).
