What do you think of the remarks by the old people you know?  Do they offer wisdom?  Do they complain?  Are they forward-looking?  Are they funny?  The seven poems featured on this episode offer a variety of responses.  William Matthews, “Grandmother Talking,” from Search Party: Collected Poems, ed. by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, Houghton Mifflin...

How do we respond to the birds in our community?  What do they tell us about ourselves?    This show features eight poems: Emily Dickinson, “A Bird Came Down the Walk”; Isaac Rosenberg, “Returning, We Hear the Larks”; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, from the opening of 3.5; W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole”; Greg Delanty, “On...

Do we imagine the dead as content in their zone, or do they express anxieties about how the world of the living functions in their absence?  Poems in this episode offer contrasting answers: Frederic Weatherly’s “Danny Boy”; A.E. Housman’s “Is My Team Ploughing?”; Thomas Hardy’s “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?”; John McCrae’s “In...