Welcome back to Season 18 of the Well Read Poem. During this season, we are offering our listeners six poems about family life. The poems selected for this season are quite various in style and manner, and have been chosen for the light they shed on relationships between parents and children, between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. We hope that these readings will, in their small way, add a measure of comfort and happiness to the lives of our audience during these winter months.

Today's poem is "To My Brothers" by John Keats. Poem reading begins at timestamp 7:36.

To My Brothers

by John Keats

Small, busy flames play through the fresh laid coals,     And their faint cracklings o'er our silence creep     Like whispers of the household gods that keep A gentle empire o'er fraternal souls. And while, for rhymes, I search around the poles,     Your eyes are fix d, as in poetic sleep,     Upon the lore so voluble and deep, That aye at fall of night our care condoles. This is your birth-day Tom, and I rejoice     That thus it passes smoothly, quietly. Many such eves of gently whisp'ring noise     May we together pass, and calmly try What are this world s true joys, ere the great voice,     From its fair face, shall bid our spirits fly.