Coleridge's "The Nightingale"

When Michael and I read poetry in our two-person reading club, we like to read it aloud. Today was the first time either Michael or I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale," and we both enjoyed it tremendously. 

It struck me, while reading this poem about a bird doing its best to get its thoughts and feelings out while there is time to do so (and, of course, about so much more), that there is a marked difference between reading poetry out loud by yourself and reading poetry out loud to (and with) someone else.

It is not unlike the way playing music by yourself feels different from playing music when someone is listening to you play.

Michael and I are reading our way through the eighty volumes of the "Penguin Little Black Classics." They are small books (around fifty pages long) filled with texts that are in the public domain (some that we might otherwise not have chosen to read). It has been a great adventure in many ways, including an adventure in the documented need for human proofreaders to make sure the names of the writers are spelled correctly on the covers.

Here's case in point:

Michael has a photo of the typo on the cover of the Thomas Nashe volume of the set in this blog post.