This is an I-Hart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

Today is Saturday, and we have for you today a vault episode, The Harth Part 2 of 2,

originally published 1219, 2024. This is the continuation

of our look at the importance of the fireplace in the hearth stone in human culture, psychology,

and myth. So let us gather around its gentle warm glow.

Here, here is certitude, you swore, below this lightning-blasted tree, where once it strikes,

it strikes no more.

Fool, and you sang, here is a three, and in this three love lies unshaken, as now

so must it always be.

You sang with harsh notes to awaken that ancient toad who sits immured within your hearthstone,

light forsaken.

He knows that limits long endured must open out in vanity,

that gates by bolts of gold secured must open out in vanity.

Music bolts of gold secured must open out in vanity.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Hamm. And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two in our series on The Fireplace and the Harth. That reading at the opening was an excerpt from, not the whole poem, but an excerpt from a poem called Essay on Knowledge by the poet Robert Graves, the author of I. Claudius, or as some might call it, Iclavdives. And so this poem, we were a little confused

because, Rob, you dug this up, and I'd never read it before, but I really liked it. But we were

confused because we were finding multiple versions of the same poem. And it turns out that's not an error. There actually are multiple versions of this poem. So it's kind of like with some of these Walt Whitman poems where like, you know, he published multiple drafts of the same work. Uh, that's going on here. Graves published an early version of the poem called essay on

knowledge and then a later one called Vanity.

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