Hour of Twilight

George William Russell, born in 1867 and died in 1935, was an Irish writer and painter who published under the initials AE. He was a central figure in the Irish literary revival and was known as a mystic as much as a poet, with a deep interest in spiritual traditions. “The Hour of Twilight” was gathered in his Collected Poems in 1913, and it belongs to the contemplative strain in his poetry, which often turns towards nature and the unseen.

This is a so-called multi-version recording, a format that LibriVox uses for its weekly and fortnightly poetry projects. A group of volunteers choose a short poem, each records it in their own way, and all the recordings are collected together. The project for this poem dates from the week of 18 November 2007. Here there are 14 recordings, each identified by the initials of its reader, and the total running time is only about twenty minutes.

Listening to several readings of one poem is a pleasure that print cannot easily offer. The same words become slower or quicker, softer or more formal, and details you might miss in a single reading come into focus: a pause, a stress, a change of breath. It also gives a taste of the variety of the volunteers who make up LibriVox. A short poem about the end of the day is a good one for such an exercise, and it can be heard in a quiet moment as the light goes down. Taken together, the fourteen recordings make an odd and charming document of a single week in the LibriVox community, when volunteers all over the world took up the same few lines. A listener can follow the whole series or choose a favourite, and may find that the poem’s quiet mood grows deeper with each repetition.