Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. I would like to talk about a

poem which is one of the few poems I know of by heart. It's a poem I've used that

sound checks in theatres and on TV shows for the last probably 10 years.

I chose it for a book where they asked celebrities to choose poems.

It was a book called Poems for Refugees in 2002 that was published.

Just a couple of years ago I read this poem on radio for or recited it and there were tears in my eyes. Familiarity did not dole its power. I can still cry at a sound check.

It's a poem by the famous English poet William Wordsworth and it was written in 1798 and it's called or at least its first line is she dwelt among the untrodden ways and I'd

like to talk about it to you obviously why bring it up otherwise

So that's what it begins she she dwelt among the entrodden ways

Beside the springs of Darv are made and there was none to praise and very few

to love.

So the entrodden ways we're going to go with Wordsworth where poetry doesn't normally go.

We're going to deliberately step off the diving board into the deep end of anonymity. Beside the springs of Dove,

so he's given this woman a geographical location he's making her actual making a real there's

often a sort of journalistic element to words words, words, poetry. He walked about a lot all over the place and he met various

examples of the poor, of people from rural areas and he wrote a series of encounter

poems so he might meet an old man desperately trying to get a tree stomp out of the ground or he might

meet a female vagrant or a little girl who insists that a dead brother and sister are still very much part of the family.

So he would talk to these people and then share it with us.

That is not what this poem is about. In fact I think it's an

interesting contrast but we'll come to that later. So she dwelt among the

untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove and made them there was none to praise and very

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