Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Summer's Afternoon
Benjamin King (1857–1894)
Read by Alan Clare, Esther, JemmaBlythe, Jon Scott Jones, JVaughn, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Lee Ann Howlett, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Mary Anderson, PodVoxer · 11 chapters · 17 min
About the book
Summer afternoons have a way of lengthening and slowing, and the poem A Summer’s Afternoon, by Benjamin King, tries to catch that feeling in verse. It was chosen by LibriVox volunteers as a weekly poetry project for the end of July, 2007, as the summer days began to wind down, and eleven of them recorded their own reading. Each version gives the poem a slightly different light, according to the voice and the pace. The recordings are brief, so the whole set can be heard in a single sitting, or you can choose a voice and settle into its reading. Eleven short recordings of one summer poem. A fine little offering for anyone who likes to hear how a single poem changes from voice to voice and from reader to reader.
Introduction
Benjamin King (1857-1894) was an American writer who is remembered especially for light verse. A Summer’s Afternoon appeared in 1905, after his death, and it is a short poem on a seasonal subject, in keeping with the lighter tradition in which he worked.
The recording is a multi-version project, which means that several different volunteers each read the entire poem, and each reading is presented as a separate file. This one was the weekly poetry project for the week of July 29th, 2007. The idea of the weekly poetry series was to give contributors a short text to prepare quickly, and to give listeners a chance to compare different interpretations.
Hearing the same lines eleven times is a pleasure of its own. Small differences in speed, emphasis and tone show that a poem is not a fixed object but an event that occurs each time it is spoken. Some readers will linger over the lines, others will move briskly, and in each case the listener hears something slightly new.
The whole collection lasts about twenty minutes. It can be played in the afternoon sun, as the poem suggests, or at any other time one wants a short break. It is a good example of the small, shared projects through which LibriVox volunteers keep the poetry of the past alive. Each reading was prepared for that week of the project, so the set is a snapshot of how eleven volunteers heard the same few lines at the same moment in the summer of 2007.
Public domain
Benjamin King died in 1894: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text