À Nautical Ballad

Charles Edward Carryl (1841-1920) was an American businessman and writer who is remembered chiefly for his children's fantasy and for a handful of comic poems that have outlived most of his other work. A Nautical Ballad is the best known of these. Its nonsense is of the cheerfully logical kind: the speaker narrates a voyage in which everything goes slightly wrong, and the verse bounces along with a swing that practically asks to be chanted. The poem has been reprinted in many anthologies of humorous and children's verse, and it remains a favourite for reading aloud.

This item belongs to a LibriVox tradition known as the multi-version poem, where volunteers each record the same short text and the results are gathered under one title. In this case there are twenty-one recordings, each marked with the initials or username of its reader. Because the words never change, you can listen closely to what the performer brings: the tempo, the emphasis, the accent, the way a joke is timed or a rhyme is landed. Voices, accents and styles differ from one reader to the next, and the contrast is part of the charm.

Running for roughly forty-five minutes in all, the collection is easy to explore. You might pick a few voices at random, or work through every version and choose a favourite. It also makes a good introduction to the volunteer project itself, which depends on ordinary readers giving their time and their voices to make literature freely available. Today the poem still delivers what its author clearly intended: a quick, silly, rhythmic pleasure that is best shared out loud.