Audio Literature Odyssey

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 16:00:00 -0400

The Chariot, Before the Ice is in the Pools, Retrospect, Power, Forbidden Fruit, Much Madness Is Divinest Sense, Success, Our Share Of Night To Bear, If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking, Almost, The Heart Asks Pleasure First, Exclusion, In A Library, The Secret, I Felt A Funeral In My Brain, The Mystery of Pain, As Imperceptibly As Grief, The Bustle in a House

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0400

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was published in the New England Magazine in 1892. The story is told through the protagonist's journal, which she writes secretly over the course of several months, while staying in a rented mansion. As she narrates the story, she reveals that she has been suffering from a nervous condition and has been prescribed rest with strict orders not to work or socialize. Unfortunately, her husband is a physician who doesn't think anything is wrong with her that a little rest and fresh air won't cure. As time passes and the narrator is alienated from the activities and people that enliven her spirit, she sinks deeper and deeper into a depression that preys upon her mind. She becomes obsessed with the hideous yellow wallpaper in her room and succumbs to a delusion, which drives her across the line separating reality from fantasy.

Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0400

A PSALM OF LIFE

THE BUILDERS

SOMETHING LEFT UNDONE

MOONLIGHT

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0400

The old man is kind, but he has a vulture eye and his heart beats like a watch enveloped in cotton. It is too much for the narrator to bear, whose senses are acute. No, the old man must die. Yet, will death stop the beating heart, or will it never cease?

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0400

The narrator is comparing someone he knows intimately with the season of summer. To him, the most pleasant season is not as pleasant as this person who will last an eternity and will never die, because he/she will live forever in the lines of this sonnet.

The Fulness of Life by Edith Wharton

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0400

When a woman dies, the Spirit of Life rewards her with the opportunity to spend all of eternity with her true soul mate (something she did not experience in life). Trouble is, she still feels an allegiance to her awkward husband alive on earth who believed her to be his soul mate. Which man will she choose?