Christmas Poetry

Written by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Herrick and Christinas Rossetti

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Tim Graham and Ghizela Rowe

Christmas, they say, comes but once a year. In these days it seems to also last for much of that year.

For the religious amongst us this annual celebration of the Birth of Christ must seem bitter sweet; it’s acknowledgment by billions of people countered by the pervasive spread of material possessions translating the event to little more than a sales pitch for their own wares.

Most religions celebrate their founders but Christianity seems somehow to have lost possession of one of its key rituals in an ever more secular West. The spread of globalisation seems to have hindered rather than helped the true meaning of the festival. Children today are much more interested in what presents they might receive than any spiritual message. As parents too, most of us buy into this and we seem to indulge our offspring rather than the themes and aims of the festival’s meaning common to us all.

In this collection we rely on the words and wisdom of such fine poets as John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Sheehan, Wordsworth, Longfellow and a whole host of others to absorb us in a Christmas time of hope and togetherness set amongst a landscape of winter wonderment and Nature’s palest palette. The experiences and memories they share with us speak of a time, of a world that did have a common purpose and an ambition to share good fortune with everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839676901

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English author and poet who began writing in India and shortly found his work celebrated in England. An extravagantly popular, but critically polarizing, figure even in his own lifetime, the author wrote several books for adults and children that have become classics, Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous and others. Although taken to task by some critics for his frequently imperialistic stance, the author’s best work rises above his era’s politics. Kipling refused offers of both knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, but was the first English author to receive the Nobel prize.