Name of France

Henry van Dyke (1852-1933) was an American author, clergyman, educator and diplomat. He served as a professor at Princeton University and, under President Woodrow Wilson, as the American minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He wrote essays, stories and many poems, and he was a popular public speaker. The Name of France was published in 1917, at a time when the war had made France a subject of particular feeling in the United States.

This collection is a multi-version recording from LibriVox’s weekly poetry series. The project was prepared for the week of July 8th, 2007, which was chosen to coincide with the French national holiday. The poem was recorded eleven times, and each version appears as a separate file.

The idea behind such a project is that a poem is not entirely contained in its words. Voice, pace and emphasis all matter, and hearing several readings in a row makes this easy to appreciate. Some readers lean into the poem’s emotion; others read with restraint, and both approaches can work.

The total length is about twenty minutes. You may listen to all eleven versions in order, or pick a few and compare. It is a modest piece of occasional verse, and a good example of the way LibriVox volunteers turn a simple idea into a shared performance. There is no particular order in which these recordings must be heard, and a listener may find it interesting to start with the reader whose name is first on the list and then compare the others. The short length makes the collection a good example for anyone curious about how LibriVox works with poetry.