Jane Cooper’s “The Faithful”
Chalbert * Track #11 On CHalbertA3
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Album CHalbertA3
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- #2Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
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- #3Billy Collins’s “The Fish”
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- #4D. H. Lawrence’s “At the Window”
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- #5Dana Gioia’s “The End of the World”
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- #6Dudley Randall’s “The Ballad of Birmingham”
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- #7Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream”
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- #8Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone”
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- #9Emily Dickinson’s “I’ll tell you how the sun rose”
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- #10Emily Dickinson’s “When I was small, a Woman died (596)”
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- #11Jane Cooper’s “The Faithful”
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- #12T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
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- #13Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”
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- #14W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
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- #15Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”
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- #16Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”
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- #17William Butler Yeats’s “Brown Penny”
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- #18William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116”
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- #19Coral Bracho’s “Desde Esta Luz”
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Jane Cooper’s “The Faithful” by Chalbert
Performed by
ChalbertAbout
(DRAMATIC SITUATION)
The main speaker is someone who is haunted by grief (they lost someone). There is a second speaker, who is dead when the main speaker recalls what he said in italics.The occasion is him/her becoming plagued with fear and grief. The audience could be a person who has lost someone...
Jane Cooper’s “The Faithful” Annotated
Once you said joking slyly, If I’m killed
I’ll come to haunt your solemn bed,
I’ll stand and glower at the head
And see if my place is empty still, or filled.
What was it woke me in the early darkness
Before the first bird’s twittering?
—A shape dissolving and flittering
Unsteady as a flame in a drafty house.
It seemed a concentration of the dark burning
By the bedpost at my right hand
While to my left that no man’s land
Of sheet stretched palely as a false morning....
All day I have been sick and restless. This evening
Curtained, with all the lights on,
I start up—only to sit down.
Why should I grieve after ten years of grieving?
What if last night I was the one who lay dead
While the dead burned beside me
Trembling with passionate pity
At my blameless life and shaking its flamelike head?