Category: Podcast
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What remains ours when life takes control out of our hands?There are poems we admire for their language.There are poems we remember because we learned them at school.And then there are poems that seem to wait for us until life gives us a reason to understand them. William Ernest Henley’s Invictus belongs to the last…
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In this second contribution to my Musical Poetry series linking public domain poetry with King Charles III’s concept of Harmony, I turn to one of the great poems of English literature: William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Written in 1798, Wordsworth’s poem is about nature, memory, weariness, restoration, and the healing…
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What does harmony really mean? Not harmony only as a musical idea, but harmony as a way of seeing life: the hidden connection between people, nature, memory, beauty, and the world around us. This new episode of Musical Poetry begins a series on harmony, inspired in part by the documentary “Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision”,…
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A quiet kind of love. In this episode of Musical Poetry, Michael Appelt brings Lord Byron’s timeless poem “She Walks in Beauty” into a new space, a reflective, 90s-inspired ballad shaped by restraint, warmth, and emotional honesty. Written in 1814, when Byron was just 26, the poem captures a fleeting moment: a woman seen in…
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A light returns. In this episode of Musical Poetry, we bring Spring Song by Paul Laurence Dunbar into a new space—carried by a warm jazz big band arrangement that lets the poem breathe, swing, and gently unfold. Written in the early years of Dunbar’s career in the 1890s, Spring Song captures a quiet and timeless…
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A haiku. Three lines. One moment. In this episode of Musical Poetry, the same poem is spoken across multiple languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Persian. The journey moves toward the Middle East, ending in a quiet Persian stanza where only one word remains: Sahar – dawn. This multilingual poem reflects…
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In this episode of Musical Poetry, Michael Appelt reflects on one of the most powerful travel experiences of his life: one unforgettable week in Egypt. From the Pyramids of Giza and the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), to the monumental temples of Abu Simbel near Aswan, relocated in a remarkable UNESCO-led rescue between 1964…
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When power grows impatient with restraint, poetry remembers. This episode of Musical Poetry brings together three voices from three centuries in a single musical conversation: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in the shadow of Napoleon’s fall, reflecting on power after history has passed judgment. The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, written after the…
Michael Appelt 