Audiobook · read by volunteers
Lines Written in Early Spring
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
Read by bowski22, David Barnes, EnglishNomad, Howard Dratch, JemmaBlythe, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Karen Savage, Lee Ann Howlett, Laurie Anne Walden, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 15 chapters · 20 min
About the book
Few poems capture the first stirrings of the year as simply as this one by William Wordsworth. Seated in a grove, the poet listens to birds, watches primroses and periwinkle and feels the pull of a spring day, and he cannot help turning over what people have made of one another while the natural world seems so content. The poem is short, quiet and built on a plain, singing rhythm that sounds different in every voice. Here you can hear fifteen separate readings of it, gathered as part of a weekly poetry project. Taken together they last about twenty minutes, so you can listen to them one after another and notice how a pause, a stress or a change of pace alters the feeling of the same lines. It is a pleasant way to start a morning, and a good exercise in listening closely.
Introduction
William Wordsworth, born in 1770 and died in 1850, is one of the central figures of English Romantic poetry. With his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge he published Lyrical Ballads, a book that argued for poetry written in the language of ordinary speech and rooted in feeling and in nature. Lines Written in Early Spring belongs to that circle of work and carries the date 1798.
The poem is built from short stanzas with a steady rhythm, and its theme is a contrast: the harmony of living things in a spring grove on one side, and the sadness the poet feels about human conduct on the other. Readers have long admired how unforced it sounds. It is often anthologised as an example of the Romantic attitude toward the natural world.
This is a multi-version recording, a format in which volunteers each record the same short text. There are fifteen versions, each lasting a minute or two. The collection was produced for the weekly poetry project of late March 2007. Listening to many voices reading one poem teaches you something that a single recording cannot: poems are performed, not simply read, and each performance finds something slightly different in the words. The poem itself is easy to learn by heart, and many listeners find that after hearing several versions they begin to murmur the lines themselves. If you enjoy poetry read aloud, this collection is a small treat, and it may encourage you to explore the other poems in the same series of weekly projects.
Public domain
William Wordsworth died in 1850: 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