The Death of Orpheus was the name we gave the final morning workshop in the 2024 Bicentenary Workshop series in Queen Square. We revisited our journey through some of the best loved lyrical moments in the Victorian canon before engineering a head-on collision between Robert Browning’s “O to be in England” and the opening lines of TS Eliot’s masterwork, “The Waste Land”. CAROLINE HEATON gave a compelling reading of the Browning piece. DAVID RUMSEY showed what ballad form could become in accomplished hands – in this case, with a spellbinding reading of the closing verses of Oscar Wilde’s ” The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” The main task of the morning was to remind ourselves of our much loved “The Waste Land Revisited” lockdown collaboration with the MOOR POETS from Devon. For this we were fortunate to have six of the original lockdown writers in the room, including PETER REASON with his own song “Dark Times” as well as his politically corrected variant on Paddy Roberts cellar bar shocker “The Ballad of Bethnal Green.” You can hear Peter’s “Dark Times” here. As we zigzagged between our own and Eliot’s original text, we were able to revisit our own takes on contemporary London and the River Thames, as well as some of the dramatic monologues created by the lockdown group. Moor Poet CATHY NICHOLLS was the writer for Ezra Pound and Eliot’s fireside discussion of the editing of Eliot’s baggy text. MARILYN FRANCIS gave us the voice of Ripper Victim Polly Nicholls and AMA BOLTON a haunting unaccompanied rendition of Sue Boyle’s “Mermaids’ Song” which had been one of the closing sections in our original performance piece.