Kenneth Grahame's "A Song of Mr. Toad"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

Kenneth Grahame (8 March 1859 – 6 July 1932) is best remembered for the classic of children's literature The Wind in the Willows (1908). Scottish by birth, he spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in England, following the death of his mother and his father's inability to look after the children. After attending St Edward's School in Oxford, his ambition to attend university was thwarted and he joined the Bank of England, where he had a successful career. Before writing The Wind in the Willows, he published three other books: Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age(1895), and Dream Days (1898).

-bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, November 8th, 2024. And because it's Friday, we're going to have a little fun. I used to live with my family in Richmond, Virginia, and there was an amazing French bistro there, the can can. And all of their food is marvelous. But one of the surprising
0:23.0	gems on their menu was their cheeseburger. The buns were made in house. They had this custom
0:30.1	blend of ground meats. It was so good. And so occasionally, as a treat at the end of the week,
0:36.6	we would order out a round of burgers for a Friday dinner.
0:41.3	And the restaurant would always pile in a very generous amount of French fries along with each burger.
0:50.3	And we would get them home and open six takeout boxes bursting to the gills with French fries.
0:57.3	And we would put everybody's burger on a plate, and then we would pile all of the fries into a big communal platter.
1:04.2	And my children never cease to be amazed by the abundance of French fries.
1:10.2	And they began to associate the generous portions of fries
1:15.2	with the day on which we were ordering our cheeseburgers. And I was never able to dissuade
1:21.5	them of this connection that the restaurant was giving an extra large helping of fries because it was Friday.
1:30.1	And even though we don't live in Richmond anymore and we don't eat burgers on Friday anymore,
1:35.3	they still remember this magical experience.
1:38.8	And for them, it has given to the day of the week, this enduring quality of wonder and magnanimity. So Friday is
1:48.7	fun day. And in that spirit, we have an excerpt from Kenneth Graham's 1908 classic, The Wind
1:56.9	and the Willows. This is a book that I aspire to read every year, even though I don't
2:03.2	always succeed. It's a book that makes me cry every time and laugh all the time. And the
2:09.3	excerpt today is a song, the song of Mr. Toad. It comes from the chapter More Adventures of Mr. Toad. It is the section in which
2:20.3	Mr. Toad is trying to get his hands on various means of conveyance. He tries to scam a barge woman
2:28.1	into allowing him to steer the barge. He steals her horse and then eventually finds his way to stealing a motor car with
2:38.7	famously disastrous results. This is a song composed by him, of course, and it goes like this.
2:47.5	The world has held great heroes, as history books have showed, but never a name to go down to fame
	...

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