Captain Sword and Captain Pen: A Poem

audiobook

Captain Sword and Captain Pen: A Poem

by Leigh Hunt

EN·~1 hours·11 chapters

Chapters

11 total
1

![To face the Title. [To face the Title.

0:02
2

CAPTAIN SWORD AND CAPTAIN PEN. - A Poem. - BY LEIGH HUNT.

0:51
3

ADVERTISEMENT.

1:10
4

CAPTAIN SWORD AND CAPTAIN PEN. - I. - How Captain Sword marched to War.

2:24
5

II. How Captain Sword won a Great Victory.

4:19
6

III. Of the Ball that was given to Captain Sword.

1:41
7

IV. On What took place on the Field of Battle the Night after the Victory.

6:28
8

V. How Captain Sword, in Consequence of his Great Victories, became infirm in his Wits.

4:14
9

VI. Of Captain Pen, and how he fought with Captain Sword.

5:36
10

POSTSCRIPT; - CONTAINING SOME REMARKS ON WAR AND MILITARY STATESMEN.

0:04

Description

A vivid, rhymed tableau opens the work with Captain Sword rallying his troops beneath a fluttering flag, drums thundering through sun‑lit hills and towns. The poet’s language swells with triumph and spectacle, yet a steady undercurrent of irony folds the grand parade into a questioning of glory itself. From the opening march, the piece balances bold, martial imagery with the softer cadence of the “Captain Pen,” hinting at the clash between might and thought.

Beyond the battlefield pageantry, the poem becomes a meditation on the cost of war, borrowing Milton’s plea for peace without ambition or violence. Its regular yet slightly irregular four‑beat meter lends a musical quality that mirrors the drums it describes, while the narrator’s reverence for a statesman who denounces conflict adds a contemporary moral dimension. Listeners will find themselves drawn into a lyrical debate between sword and pen, where heroic spectacle meets a quiet, thoughtful call for reason.

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Details

Language

en

Duration

~1 hours (82K characters)

Publisher of text edition

Project Gutenberg

Credits

Produced by David Edwards, Emmy and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Release date

2009-03-06

Rights

Public domain in the USA.

About the author

Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt

1784–1859

A lively voice of the English Romantic period, he mixed poetry, criticism, and journalism with unusual warmth and wit. Best remembered as a champion of writers like Keats and Shelley, he also helped shape the literary culture around them.

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