Classical Poetry PDF EPUB Audio

Tales of a Wayside Inn

Downloads: 100+
First published: 1863
Pages: 171

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Read by Peter Yearsley · 2 h 44 min · 10 parts

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Prelude; The Landlord's Tale (Paul Revere's Ride)
22:57
The Student's Tale (The Falcon of Ser Federigo); The Spanish Jew's Tale (The Legend of Rabbi Ben Levi)
22:47
The Sicilian's Tale (King Robert of Sicily)
13:45
The Musician's Tale, Parts I-VI
19:02
The Musician's Tale, Parts VII-XII
17:20
The Musician's Tale, Parts XIII-XVII
14:17
The Musician's Tale, Parts XVIII-XXII; Interlude
14:22
The Theologian's Tale; Interlude
14:31
The Poet's Tale; Finale
14:44
Miscellaneous poems
10:27

Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) is a public domain work.

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About this book

On an autumn night in Sudbury, Massachusetts, six guests and their landlord settle by the fire of an old colonial tavern with a red horse on its weathered sign, and each takes a turn telling a story in verse. Longfellow borrowed the frame from Chaucer, but the material roams: the midnight alarm of "Paul Revere's Ride," a Norse chronicle in twenty-two parts as "The Saga of King Olaf," a Boccaccio tale of a ruined nobleman and his last falcon, a grim episode of Inquisition Spain in "Torquemada," and a Connecticut town that learns what follows when it kills off its songbirds. This 1863 volume is Part First, where "Paul Revere's Ride" reached book form after its magazine run, and it closes with a group of lyrics titled "Birds of Passage: Flight the Second." The interludes keep the talk unhurried.

About the author

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow was the most widely read poet in the English-speaking world in his own century and close to unread in the next, a fall worth explaining rather than simply repeating. He taught modern languages at Harvard, made the first American translation of Dante's Commedia, and wrote for a public that memorised verse as a matter of course.