Hearing Percy Bysshe Shelley read aloud was a revelation

Last week I heard the actor Julian Sands give a virtuoso performance of work by Percy Bysshe Shelley to mark the bicentenary of the radical poet’s death this month. A couple of days later, I listened to a bit more Shelley, this time on the radio, and this time in the voice of Benjamin Zephaniah.

Hearing his verses read aloud is so much more intimate than reading them silently. You may be sitting in a crowd, but as Shelley’s words fall into your ears, it’s possible to feel that you’re having a private audience with him. Reading the same poems in an empty room can be comparatively distancing. Zephaniah said something similar when he described his first encounter with the poetry at school. He was given a bit of ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ to read quietly to himself and told to explain what it meant. He couldn’t. His teacher called him stupid.

There’s a lot of tension at the moment over the shake-up of the school syllabus and the removal of certain poets from the curriculum. Zephaniah’s two-part documentary, recorded before this particular debate began, felt like a necessary defence of the dead white man whose work he learned to love.

The title of part one, ‘The Original Dub Poet’, says more about the audience it was aimed at than the content of the discussion itself. Zephaniah’s main point here was that Shelley exercised the voice of protest. He wrote ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ in simple ballad form to make it appeal to a wide readership and sided passionately with the working-class protestors who gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to demand parliamentary reform.

‘Good poetry has no age,’ said Zephaniah, ‘and no colour.’